


Roots Above

by Thunderhel



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alien AU, M/M, Moderate Depictions of Blood and Violence, Sci Fi AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-01
Updated: 2018-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-21 05:50:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 41,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9534410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thunderhel/pseuds/Thunderhel
Summary: "Being gay was hard, that was just a fact of life. Being gay in rural Georgia was really hard. Being gay in rural Georgia and getting abducted by aliens was a level of unfairness and cruelty that left Eric Bittle going over the span of his entire 19 years of existence to try to figure out exactly where he went wrong."In which Eric Bittle, baker and mostly wholesome Georgia gay boy, gets abducted by aliens, and then the government, and might have to team up with a group of even bigger freaks than himself to become government issued superheroes to make it home. Or else, maybe accept the fact that these freaks might just be his new home, or something lame and weird like that.





	1. Way Down We Go

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’ve been working on this stupid story for _months_ and honestly I’m just tired of looking at it, so here we go, my Magnum Opus in the form of an unasked for Alien/Men in Black AU. It’s been super fun to write and I hope at least a few of you enjoy how weird we’re gonna get. Or at least try to get. Also a _**huge**_ shout out to [anlittlegay](http://anlittlegay.tumblr.com/) for editing the first few chapters for me. You are a saint and I hope good things on you and your whole family. Also more shout outs to [acesvegas](http://acesvegas.tumblr.com/) and [midnitedancer](http://midnitedancer.tumblr.com/) for being my hype crew for this fic.

Being gay was hard, that was just a fact of life. Being gay in rural Georgia was really hard. Being gay in rural Georgia and getting abducted by aliens was a level of unfairness and cruelty that left Eric Bittle going over the span of his entire 19 years of existence to try to figure out exactly where he went wrong. 

“It wasn’t an abduction.”

Eric didn’t remember reiterating the fact out loud, but maybe the government agent seated on his mother’s favorite floral upholstered settee could read minds. For a fleeting moment the thought passed through his head _‘that’s not possible’_ before he remembered with a panicked sort of hilarity that things like ‘not possible’ didn’t exist anymore. Twenty-seven hours and sixteen minutes ago the world had made sense. The world had rules and guidelines and things were hard but things progressed along at a normal linear pace. Twenty-seven hours and fifteen minutes ago, Eric was in an alien spacecraft. 

There were two real life Men in Black, _-except only one of them was a man but that was beside the point-_ sitting in his living room, drinking his mother’s sun tea and calmly discussing that fact like they did this every day of their lives. Which they probably did. 

“We are not the Men in Black,” the same man seated on the settee said in the same tone of voice that hinted at both eternal patience and annoyance at the same time. At least that time Eric was fairly certain he hadn’t read his mind, as his almost equally frazzled mother had just asked if they were going to wipe their memories. 

The agent at the door, a tiny wisp of a woman who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, smiled for just a split second. Her black blazer looked a little too big on her, like they couldn’t find something small enough, but she still looked deadlier than anyone Eric had ever seen. 

The man who spoke gave a quiet sigh, gently setting down his sunflower encrusted teacup on its matching saucer. This was the part that had Eric more unsettled than anything. Okay that wasn’t true, the most unsettling part by a long shot was still the trip he took in an extra terrestrial craft, but the calmness with which the federal agents were dealing with the situation wasn’t helping.

He felt like his skin was buzzing, like he couldn’t hold it all together and he might fall apart molecule by molecule if he continued to sit there too long. Twenty-seven hours and he hadn’t slept, felt like he hadn’t even blinked as his hands wouldn’t stop shaking and his ears wouldn’t stop ringing. It took him a minute to register that everyone had stopped talking and was staring at him. 

“Has he been doing that long?” The man asked, obviously still watching Eric even as he addressed Suzanne Bittle. 

“Y-yes,” his mother stammered, swallowing hard and folding her hands together in her best display of southern hospitality in the face of the absolutely unimaginable and horrific. “Ever since he…got back.” 

“That can happen,” the agent said sagely, like they were discussing the side effects of a new medication. 

“How long will that last?” Asked Coach, his voice wavering only slightly at the start of his sentence. Eric had never seen his father so rattled, his usually stoic expression of indifference shaken into something that came almost close to concern. 

“I was abducted,” Eric interrupted before the agent could answer that asinine question, because it seemed they had gotten off topic. His voice was too loud in the following silence. “I…was scooped up into the sky, by… by _aliens_ ,” he exclaimed, raising his arms into the air to punctuate his story. 

“Mr. Bittle I understand this is a confusing and uncertain time for you,” the agent politely ignored the sputtering noise Eric made, “but we need you to remain calm. You were not abducted.”

“Yes I _was_!” His feet had been lifted off the ground. There had been flashing lights and mechanical whirring and he had been lifted off the ground and ended up in a world of blinking lights and ominous clicking noises and some creature with green skin and too many eyes and…actually beyond that he couldn’t really remember anything. The sheer weight of the opening realization of his adventure was too much as it was. 

“You,” Agent Eric-probably-should-have-been-listening-to-his-name continued, “were an unfortunate casualty in a class-C Extra Terrestrial Terra Home World dispute that took place twenty-seven hours ago, a half a mile from this location,” he continued in that tone that insisted all of this made sense and Eric was the irrational one here. “When the aforementioned _extra terrestrial beings_ ,” he punctuated that and followed it with a pause like it meant something, “realized that they had acquired sentient organic cargo as a result of their damaged depolarized rash-“ 

“You were picked up by accident,” the tiny woman at the door interjected, her tone and her expression never shifting. “It was a stolen ship and they were trying to throw the authorities off their tail with damaged equipment and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she explained in a far less patronizing tone than the one of her superior. Eric wondered why she hadn’t been the one talking all along. “We were alerted and you were returned.” 

Eric ran his hands through his hair, holding onto a few strands to ground himself. “I was abducted by alien bank robbers?” 

“More like…extra terrestrial extortionists, but you’re on the right track. Abducting a human is a pretty serious offence and they thought they would get off lighter if they returned you.” 

“I…was a bargaining chip?” 

Both agents in black paused. “In a sense,” the man finally asserted. 

“None of that matters,” his mother insisted, her voice a little too high. Eric wanted to interject that it _absolutely_ did matter, thank you very much, but she continued before he could get the words in. “Is he going to be okay?” 

When she looked at him, Eric felt his anger drain out. She looked more tired than he had ever seen her, her eyes were too wet and her hands were shaking in her lap. Coach reached over when Eric found he couldn’t move, placing a hand on her shoulder. Eric couldn’t remember ever seeing him do that before. 

It took a moment for Eric to realize the agents had paused. Sharply he looked back at them, a new panic he hadn’t realized he had left was rising up in him at their blank expressions. 

“What is it?” 

“While we don’t believe there is anything that could have caused any life threatening damage, we are still going to need to run some tests.” 

Eric felt his mouth go dry. _'Tests?'_ He had meant to ask the question out loud, but he wasn’t sure the words actually made it past his tongue. Images from science fiction movies flashed through his head, pictures of white walled labs and large needles and a naked test subject screaming in pain. 

“Yes, tests. All for your benefit Mr. Bittle, we want to ensure your safety and well being after this unfortunate incident.”

Eric’s outrage at his horrifying ordeal being referred to as _‘an unfortunate incident’_ couldn’t even properly overshadow the fear pulsing through his veins. 

“I feel fine,” he lied quickly, ignoring the way everything seemed to be constantly humming and the strange feeling in his limbs like they weren’t on correctly.

“It’s really not that bad,” the woman tried to reassure him. Though maybe she was really more of a girl. She held herself with the same straight back as her partner, but she couldn’t have been much older than Eric. Her expression was soft, and the twitch of her mouth wasn’t forced or patronizing. “It’s basically just blood work and X-rays. They’re not gonna pull your organs out or anything.” 

“Yes, it really is not a very dangerous or strenuous matter,” her companion continued, seeming much more awkward and mechanical in his attempts to console. “You will just have to spend about two weeks in our holding base, and then-“

“Two weeks!” Eric and his mother were instantly on their feet, panic rising between the two of them as what the agents were proposing began to sink in. “You want to take me to your secret government base for two weeks for alien tests?”

The first agent sighed in a manner that insinuated he was not compensated enough for what he was forced to deal with, and quietly rose to his feet as well. He pulled his pair of dark sunglasses out of his pocket and slid them into place. Behind him, the woman did the same. “Yes. The sort of tests that are necessary in this instance cannot be accomplished at just any lab. We are going to need to hold you in observation for the two weeks, until they can determine that you are safe to leave or if other measures need to be taken-”

“Other measures?!”

“-So you are going to need to pack a bag and we need to leave as soon as possible, our flight is in,” the agent checked a complicated watch that Eric didn’t even fully believe could tell time, “an hour and a half.” 

“We can’t make a flight out of Hartsfield in an hour and a half,” Eric said, feeling rather stupid and numb as his mother voiced her opinions beside him, loudly. 

“The plane will wait, but I do not like being late Mr. Bittle. I have other appointments today.” The agent crossed his hands behind his back, standing tall and imposing in the Bittle family sunroom. His sunglasses reflected the sparkle off of the sea glass lamp Eric had bought for his mother at the county fair last year. 

Eric felt sick. 

Behind him, his parents were still protesting. Someone said something about calling the governor, but Eric knew it was over. 

“Okay.” His throat was scratchy, like he had been crying although his eyes felt too dry. The agent whose name he still didn’t know continued to stare down at him from behind those reflective glasses. 

“You have fifteen minutes.” 

Saying goodbye to his parents might have been the most difficult part of this ridiculous process thus far. After calming him down they had tried to put on their bravest faces, helping Eric pack things that he knew he probably would never need but didn’t have the heart to leave behind. One suitcase and a stuffed duffle bag later and Eric was headed out with door, his mother’s tears still wet on his shoulder, and onto what was most likely going to be the most bizarre and terrible adventure of his life. 

For being a secret government organization, he found the two agents accompanying him to be incredibly human. They had to stop on the way to the airport so the female agent, Agent Duan, as Eric had learned, could use the bathroom. Agent Hall had picked up a People magazine and Milky Way. 

Eric had found it ironic. 

The flight hadn’t been much more interesting, a quiet and small plane with only a few other passengers scattered about. They had been three minutes late, and Agent Hall had an annoyed set of his jaw that hadn’t relaxed until they were an hour into the flight. Eric sat beside the window, Agent Duan beside him and Agent Hall in the seat in front. Since they had left his house, neither agent seemed to have tried to look directly at him, or at each other for that matter. If it wasn’t for their identical black suits and the sunglasses they now had both tucked into their pockets, Eric might have mistaken them for strangers to one another. 

Eric tapped his fingers nervously against the rim of his empty ginger-ale cup, trying to focus on the music pumping out of his earbuds, but even Beyonce wasn’t quite enough to drown out his own thoughts. When Agent Hall stood to visit the lavatory, Eric pulled out an earbud. 

“So where are we going?” He finally braved to ask, glancing at Agent Duan out of the corner of his eye. Up close, she was even smaller than he had originally thought, but there was still something lethal about her. She had a tablet in her hands, and though the screen looked completely black to Eric, she seemed highly interested in something on it, occasionally tapping at nothing. 

“Samwell,” she told him absently. Her finger moved across the blank pad like she was scrolling. 

“Samwell?” Eric repeated, hoping for further clarification. The pressure change in the plane wasn’t doing anything to help the buzzing in his head. Maybe it was all in his head, but it seemed like the cabin lights were flickering in the corners of his vision.

“Yep.” For a government agent she didn’t seem quite as hung up on professionalism as Agent Hall, popping the P at the end of the word. “Samwell Institute.” 

“So do-” Eric hesitated. His throat felt a little fuzzy. Swallowing around the newfound lump with a confused tilt to his brow, he tried to focus. “Do we, uh…” Agent Duan didn’t look up from her tablet, still poking the blank screen and seemed unconcerned with Eric’s sudden lack of articulation. 

Eric blinked quickly, feeling suddenly rather dizzy. With a low breath pushed out between his lips, he leaned back in his seat. Were they hitting turbulence, or was he imagining how bumpy the flight had just gotten? Breathing was rapidly becoming an arduous task, and panic was setting in as he gripped at the armrests, his knuckles turning white with the effort. 

“Something’s…” _Wrong._ The word wouldn’t come out, no words wanted to come out, it felt like his tongue was trying to move through molasses. He tried to form a question, tried to keep himself above water as it felt like every part of him was beginning to shut down. With an incredible feat of strength he managed to lift one sweating hand, slapping it down on Agent Duan’s arm in what was supposed to be a light tap.

Agent Duan finally looked up at him. She had very pretty eyes, Eric decided, and her close-cropped hair was a good look for her. 

“When you wake up, we’ll be there.” 

Eric tried to ask her what she meant, but found himself very suddenly and very decidedly, asleep.

**_X_ _X_ _X_**

The first thing Eric realized when he awoke was that he was very thirsty. 

In a lazy attempt to reach for his water glass he cast one arm off of the bed, but found himself meeting hard wall instead of the smooth top of his nightstand. The room was dark and warm, and everything about his current situation invited him to go back to sleep, but something was pressing at the back of his mind. Confusion worked its way through the haze of sleep and he tried to blink back the remaining tendrils of weariness. 

His second realization was that he was not in his bedroom. It took another moment for the events of the past few days to catch up to him. It was another few seconds before he remembered he had drank spiked ginger ale on a secret plane heading to a secret government base. 

Oh, man. 

After running his palms over his eyes to try to get some sense of himself back, he tried to take inventory of his surroundings. He was in a small room with plain walls, sitting on a cot. The lights above were dimmed low and there were no windows. 

Or doors.

There wasn’t a door. 

Eric was very suddenly fully awake and standing on his feet. A quick look down at himself told him he was still in the same clothes as before, and there didn’t seem to be anything else-

Wrong. There was a bandage wrapped around his left elbow, a few wraps thick and pulled tight. In the light it was hard to see, but the bandages appeared white, with only a small pinprick of something darker, right in the crook. He wasn’t sure if the rising nausea he felt along with the ache in his arm were in his head or if something terrible had been done to him. 

He had only been given a minute to begin truly panicking, when a section of the wall slid open, revealing a figure in the doorway. Eric stumbled back quickly, heart still going far too fast in his chest as he stared wide-eyed at the dark form looming in the only exit. 

For a moment, neither moved. When she finally did speak, Eric found himself wholly unprepared. 

“Hello!” The figure greeted, coming to life all at once as they waved excitedly at him. It was a woman, a young woman from the sound of her voice, but Eric couldn’t help his continued anxiety. 

“He-hello,” he tried to return, raising one hand weakly. 

“How are you feeling, Mr. Bittle?” She asked, and shifted something around in her hands. Eric thought it might have been a clipboard.

“Uhh…”

“Did you sleep enough? Would you like something to eat or drink?”

“Some water would be nice.” Nothing about anything was ever going to be normal again, Eric decided. He had taken a ride aboard a spacecraft, been kidnapped by government agents, and now he was speaking to a girl he didn’t know in a dark room like she was a concierge at a hotel. 

“Oh, of course, of course!” It looked like she might have nodded. “Would you like to me to bring it to you? You can sleep a little more if you would like before we get started. People tend to find these rooms comforting. I nap in here myself sometimes!” She paused. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.” Then she was gone, moved from the doorway and out into what may have been another room. 

Eric hesitated only a second before moving to the now open door and glancing out. The next room, or maybe it was a hallway, he found to be completely pitch black. The only light source was the soft light coming from the room he had woken up in. Still, he could hear her moving around, the sound of a faucet running for a few seconds before cutting off and her footsteps returning. 

“Here you are, Mr. Bittle.” 

Up close Eric could make out some of her features as she emerged from the darkness. She was taller than him, with long straight hair that was swept back into a ponytail. In the arm not handing him a cup, she did in fact have a clipboard. Eric didn’t know what he had been expecting, but this girl was not it. He drank the water she gave him in almost two gulps, realizing as soon as it was in his hand how thirsty he was. 

“How old are you?” He asked before he could stop himself, discreetly wiping the excess water off of his mouth. He had expected her to have a lab coat and something to poke him with, but instead she appeared to be wearing a sun dress and a pair of sneakers. 

“18!” She told him with a wide grin, her teeth almost glowing in darkness. “And your chart said you are 19, is that correct?” 

“Yes-“

“I’m Farmer.”

Eric paused, “Nice…to meet you Farmer.”

“Nice to meet you too, Mr. Bittle. Now, would you like to sleep some more, or would you like to get going?”

“Get going?” Eric had meant it as a question, but Farmer instantly accepted it as an answer. 

“Alrighty then, let’s get to it!” She flashed that blinding grin again before turning and marching back into the darkness. For a sickening moment, Eric was left alone in the dark, the shadows cast by the quietly humming lights making everything seem bigger than it was. The darkness swallowed Farmer up easily, her footsteps still padding down the way into what seemed like a very long hall. 

Eric let out a very quiet breath. He had survived an alien abduction, or as Agent Hall had put it, an accidental extra terrestrial acquirement of organic…okay, Eric couldn’t remember how Agent Hall had put it. The point was, he could handle a dark spooky hallway. 

“Mr. Bittle?”

“Eric.” He corrected as he took his first few steps into the darkness. Behind him the wall slid closed, completely immersing him in the blackness that surrounded them. “Eric is fine.” He smiled in the darkness, hoping the facial expression would ease his quiet panic beginning to build as the darkness pressed in from all sides. There was no light, no relief from the dizzying feeling of not being able to tell if his eyes were open or closed. 

“Oh!” Farmer gasped from somewhere ahead of him, and he jumped as a hand wrapped around his arm. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you, but you’re about to run right into the fridge…Eric,” she added after a pause. Her hands were freezing, sending chills through Eric straight down to his feet. While he would never been rude enough to make a comment, Eric wondered if she would be insulted if he bought her a bottle of hand lotion under the guise of a thank you gift. The poor girl needed it like no one Eric had ever met before. 

“Thank you.” He accepted her help, feeling rather like he had suddenly gone blind as she maneuvered him farther down the way. “Wait, the fridge?” 

“Yeah. It’s, uh, short for refrigerator? It’s like, a big metal box that’s used to keep food cold-“ 

“No, sorry, I know what a fridge is,” Eric interrupted, face burning hot. Despite the ridiculousness of her response, Eric had a feeling she was being completely genuine in her explanation, not mocking him. “I just, um, didn’t expect one to be in here?”

“Why not?” She was so honest in her curiosity, nothing malicious or unkind behind her words. “I need somewhere to keep my lunch!” She laughed like she had told some great joke, and Eric smiled weakly, realizing a bit belatedly that she could most likely see the expression. 

“Do you work here? Like, in the dark I mean.” 

“Yes I do! It’s easier on my eyes than the florescent lights, and the Institute likes to keep people like me over here so they don’t have to run full power to it. Win win.” Eric was pulled to a sudden halt when she stopped, surprised at the unyielding strength he found himself met with as she tightened her rough grip on his arm. “Speaking of which, you might want to brace yourself, it’s gonna get bright.” 

Eric only had time to register her words, squinting his eyes just in time as another panel of wall slid out and the two of them were directly transported directly to the sun. 

“Agh!” Eric managed to yelp, dropping Farmer’s grip as he covered his burning eyes with both hands. 

“Yeah, it’s always a little rough, just gotta go for it. Like a Band-Aid. Or, I guess that’s how you’re supposed to use Band-Aids, I don’t know.”

“You could have given me a little more warning!” Eric hissed, not caring about his manners for the moment as the world spun. 

“Sorry,” Farmer winced, managing to sound truly ashamed, quelling Eric’s anger quickly. 

“It’s okay, just…I think I might actually be blind now.” One hand still perched over his eyes like a visor, Eric squinted in his new surroundings. His other hand patted the wall as he made his way back into the light. Maybe this was how Farmer worked, and presumably lived, in the dark. Maybe she just got so accustomed to the darkness that the lights burned her eyes. Maybe- 

Eric’s consideration of Farmer’s unique position was immediately halted as he finally adjusted to the light enough to look at the girl next him. He had been right, Farmer was young and pretty with long brown hair, but for a moment he thought something had been permanently damaged in his eyes, because she couldn’t possibly be green. 

Except she was. As the world around them came into focus, Eric was one hundred percent sure that Farmer was green. Multiple shades of green actually, all moving together in swirling patterns across her skin. Skin that, in the light, now looked suspiciously like scales. Probably because it was scales. 

Maybe she could see in the dark because she was a Lizard Person. 

Lizard person. Farmer was a Lizard Person. 

She didn’t seem put off by Eric’s sudden staring, a sympathetic tilt to her head that said maybe she just thought he was still having trouble adjusting to the light. She blinked slowly at him, and Eric was struck by the unusualness of her eyes of all things, almost completely black with a thin stripe of bright yellow running around the edges. Her eyelids moved horizontal instead of vertical.

“I know, I know,” she sympathized with another bright smile. Eric didn’t know how he could have missed, even in the darkness, how each sparkling white tooth came to a sharp point. “I hate coming out here too, but once you get used to it, it’s not too bad down here. But the first step is always the worst.” 

She was still staring at him, because he was still staring at her. There was a lump in his throat that he felt might suffocate him if he didn’t so something fast. It was hard to think clearly, when all of his thoughts were some variant of _‘holy shit LIZARD PERSON!’_

Lizard or not, Farmer seemed to be a nice person and she didn’t deserve his rudeness. Clearing his throat, Eric forced himself to look away, glancing down both ends of the bright but dreary hallway the two found themselves in. “Right. Yeah. Yes.” With a chorus of _‘Lizard Person! Lizard Person! Lizard Person!’_ running through his head, Eric tried to focus. Tried to breathe. 

The hallway was bare, completely grey with tubes of bright florescent lights running the length of the ceiling. There were no doors, but both ends of the hallway seemed to break up into more hallways. It felt more like tunnels than halls, Eric thought, before what Farmer had said finally clicked into place. 

_’Down Here.’_

“Are we-“ he cut himself off immediately as his stomach dropped when he looked back at her. Nothing had changed in the 20 seconds since he had last looked. What he had assumed to be nails she was too busy to cut had turned out to be sharp claws, currently curled around that clipboard as she squinted at a few pages. He swallowed when she looked up at him. “Are we underground?” 

She smiled wide, an expression that was much more chilling now that Eric could make out the fangs and watch the scales around her lips shift to accommodate the awkward movement. It didn’t seem like it was an expression her species was built to make. “We sure are. About 50 stories actually.”

“50 stories?” The ground moved beneath Eric’s feet and he grabbed the wall for support. Above him he could feel 50 stories worth of rock and limestone and, well whatever else was in the ground, shifting over him, ready to collapse. 

“Whoa, are you okay there?” Farmer almost dropped her clipboard as she moved forward to support him, one clawed hand wrapped around his bicep to hold him steady. It only made him feel sicker as he felt her rough scales grate against his skin. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay. I’ll be okay. Just…” Eric let himself trail off as he leaned back against the wall. He was 50 stories underground, in an undisclosed location, awaiting testing for alien infections or whatever they thought he had, and being comforted by a Lizard Girl. He just needed a moment. 

“Do you need some water?” Farmer really was a very sweet girl, Lizard Person or no. He felt his heart ache with guilt, but couldn’t shake the horrible unease that crept through him with her scaly hand still wrapped around his arm. 

“No, thank you.” Eric finally managed, straightening himself up and patting the back of her hand gently, encouraging her to release her grip. Once she stepped back, Eric brushed off the nonexistent dirt from his clothes, trying to wipe his anxiety away just as easily. “No, I’m fine. I’m good. How…where do we go? What are we doing?” He was rambling just a bit, the ground beneath him still unsteady as he did his best to pretend it wasn’t.

“Well,” Farmer paused, her large black eyes suddenly focused back on her clipboard as she flipped a few pages. “We should probably get you to your dorm. Since you’re going to be staying here a while you should probably get adjusted, get a look around and everything.” He nodded quickly, trying to follow along when her eyes flickered back up to him. “Agent Duan and Mr. Knight are going to help show you around tomorrow, but for now let’s just get you settled, all right?” With another just this side of horrifying smile and a flick of her claws, Farmer began to lead the way down the hallway. 

“Two weeks.” 

“I’m sorry?” 

“Two weeks,” Eric repeated. “That’s how long they told me I would be here.” 

Up ahead, where the hallway broke, Eric could see the occasional person passing through the gap. Everyone looked somber and determined, like they all had somewhere very important to be at least five minutes ago. Eric blinked as someone who was definitely at least nine feet tall and appeared to have more limbs than necessary brushed through the gap, and missed the sympathetic frown Farmer gave him before she re-composed her features. 

“Two weeks is the minimum, yes.” 

Eric nodded. “And who is Mr. Knight?” 

“Oh, he’s one of your roommates.” 

Farmer made it a few more steps down the hall before she realized Eric had stopped behind her. Eric, for his part, felt for at least the tenth time that day that the wind had been knocked out of him. How he was still breathing, he had no idea. How many surprises could your heart take before it finally gave out on you? Would they mail his body back to his parents or just incinerate him somewhere deep down in these halls? Maybe he was being dramatic. Under the circumstances he felt entitled to it. 

“Eric?”

“My roommates?” His voice came out higher pitched than he had intended. 

“Yes!” Farmer was the first person Eric had ever wished would smile less. “We have a lot of people who live down here, and since the most amount of space has to be reserved for testing and research, living space can get limited so most occupants have to share.” She flipped back through her clipboard, the unlimited contents of which Eric was beginning to get suspicious about. “You are going to be with Misters Knight, Zimmermann, Oluransi, Birkholtz and…Johnson.” Her face scales were stretching and shifting as she looked back up at him. “You’re going to love it. It’s like…it’s like a big sleepover, or like college.” Satisfied with herself, she set off again. “I mean, not that I’ve ever really done either, but I assume, from movies and stuff you know?” 

“I was supposed to go to college,” Eric told her, feeling slightly distanced from his body as he spoke. Five roommates. Five roommates, who, for all Eric knew, could all also be Lizard People. 

He really had to curb his internal Lizard People racism. 

“Wait,” Eric said for what might have been the hundredth time since this ordeal had started. “Wait, I’m supposed to leave for Richmond in a month, am I even going to make it?” 

Farmer looked over her shoulder at him with that same sympathetic-yet-still-menacing smile. “I’m sure you will,” she assured him in a tone he was fairly certain he had once used to tell his younger cousin that _‘Of course Santa Claus existed, what a silly thing to ask.’_

Eric frowned as they continued. Once they turned the corner, Eric wasn’t sure what he expected, but it was vastly underwhelming really. A few people brushed by much closer now, but no one seemed as out of place as Farmer, all looking quite human and very busy as they moved past them to various destinations, though Eric still didn’t see a single door other than the one they had first emerged from. Though thinking back on it, that hadn’t been much of a door either, so much as a panel that had slid aside when Farmer had approached it. 

“Where are my things?” Eric finally thought to ask as they turned down another hallway. This one was wider than the others, more people moving about. It was beginning to look more like what he had expected. The walls were high and a few people brushing past were clad in lab coats with goggles and masks hanging around their necks. In their arms they carried stacks of papers and important looking containers. One man almost walked into another, so engrossed in his reading. When he passed close enough for Eric to look, he realized it was a copy of _Percy Jackson._

“Hm? Oh, your things have been put in your room. We’re almost there, promise.” 

“Okay, good. That’s good-” Eric was cut off as a sudden commotion broke out behind them. It seemed more serious than the _Percy Jackson_ incident. Farmer turned her head sharply, grabbing Eric without looking before pulling them to the side. All around them people were scattering, clearing the way as the shouting down the hall grew louder. 

“What’s going on?”

“Not sure.”

Eric saw the lights before the scientists or the container, flashing along the walls announcing their arrival. The container – or at least that was what he assumed it was – was on wheels, at least four people in front and behind, pulling it through the hall and keeping it steady. It wasn’t a siren that blared through the halls, more like an alarm, constant and low, ringing out every couple of seconds but the scientists, while urgent, didn’t seem overly concerned. It was hard to tell with the heavy masks covering their faces though. 

“What is that?” Eric leaned back against the wall as it passed, despite being fairly out of the way all ready. The container wasn’t very big, at least not for the amount of people that were escorting it. Eric guessed it would come up to his chest if he were close enough, and it was longer than it was tall. 

It looked like a metal coffin, decorating with two flashing red warning lights. They were moving fast, obviously on a mission with their bizarre cargo, but Eric caught sight of the tag, stuck in big block letters on the side. 

**01824WJP**

Eric watched as it disappeared down the hall, the activity around them returning to what he assumed to be normal. “What was that?”

Eric glanced at her quickly, and caught a strange expression on her face for just a second. Her entire face seemed to be pulled down, it was an unsettling look, one that Eric immediately acquainted with an snake about to strike, but it was gone as quickly as it had come, replaced with a much more human look of disinterest. 

Finally she shrugged, looking only mildly concerned with the interruption, a new crinkle to the scales above her eyes the only indicator that anything unusual had happened. “They must be moving something in D-Con.” She shifted her gaze to him. “I’m sure it’s fine.” As she turned away, continuing on their trek down the hall, Eric had a brief and uncertain thought that the dangerous expression she had worn might not have been dangerous at all. He thought it might have been sad. 

Eric jumped only slightly when a panel of wall suddenly slid away up ahead and Farmer disappeared into it. Much to his shock, the room they entered was only a few feet across, barely enough room for both of them to fit. His panic began to set in once more as the wall slid back into place and he found himself trapped with the reptilian Farmer, who gave him a quick smile before the room began to move. 

Not a room. Elevator. Okay, okay he could handle this. Eric took a shaky breath, realizing he hadn’t done that in a while, and clasped his hands together in front of him. Standing next to Farmer like this, side by side as the walls moved around them, he was struck again by just how tall she was. She towered a few inches over him, or maybe it was just the fangs and claws making her seem even bigger than she was. 

Eric did his best to put those thoughts aside as the room stopped moving and they were once again continuing on their journey. This new place was another hallway, although this one was a little darker and cooler, less uniform and sterile than the halls above them. It seemed more alive somehow. Behind the sloping walls, Eric could now hear people talking, voices rising above the hum of the lights overhead in a sign of humanity that made Eric begin to consider relaxing for the first time since he had arrived. 

“Here we are!” Farmer suddenly announced, stopping short and almost causing Eric to slam into her from behind as she grinned at him. 

“Uh, where?” Eric scrutinized the piece of wall she was staring at, trying to distinguish what made it different from the rest of the wall, or maybe all of the wall was just hundreds of doors, all lined up beside each other. Maybe there was some inter dimensional rift, where time and space didn’t line up right and each door led to somewhere different despite being lined beside one another. Maybe some LSD would make this all make sense. 

“Your room!” Farmer clutched her clipboard in front of her, watching him with wide eyes. She reached out with one hand and before he could stop her she tapped one claw against the bandage on his elbow. “Your DNA is in the system,” she informed him, and he wasn’t sure if that knowledge made him feel better or worse, “so you just hold up your hand and it’ll let you in. Your name will be on your bedroom door so you’ll know which one is yours.”

“Wha-“

Before Eric could begin to ask the myriad of questions that were all queuing in his head, he was cut short by a sort of crackle, coming from somewhere on Farmer’s person. 

Farmer gave him an expression that may have been exasperation or may have been panic, he couldn’t quite tell with her scales, and raised one claw to her ear and shifted something into place. “This is Farmer.” 

For a minute everything was silent. Down the hall and behind a wall someone laughed, and in front of him Farmer focused very hard on the floor, her finger still pressed to her ear. 

“Yes. Yes. Very well. Okay. Over.”

Farmer dropped her hand and rolled her eyes, flashing a lot of bright yellow. Eric felt his stomach turn. “Sorry, I’m needed back up top. You’re good, right? Everything you need is going to be in there, and your roommates will be able to help you with any questions. Mr. Knight can inform you more about your tour with him and Agent Duan tomorrow. If you need anything, just let one of them know.” 

Eric opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Suddenly, despite how frightening Farmer was, he realized that she was the closest thing he had to a friend down here in the underground and he wasn’t ready to give her up just yet. 

“Oh, it was nice meeting you, Eric. I’ll see you soon, okay?” She smiled for a moment, seemingly warring with something in her head before she surged forward and wrapped Eric in a quick but brutal hug. 

“It’s all gonna be fine, you’ll see.” She promised before she was pulling away and moving down the hall at a speed that told Eric she had been taking it slow for his benefit. Blinking at her retreating form, Eric clenched his fingers together. Pulling his gaze away he focused on the blank wall before him. 

Well, things definitely weren’t getting any weirder anyway. Might as well get it over with. From the other side of the panel he heard a crash, followed by an angry shout. Eric winced, his hands clenched into fists instinctively. 

With a steady breath, Eric raised his hand and the wall slid open.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So here we go. First chapter out in the world and fending for itself. Exciting stuff. Currently I have about half of this story written and awaiting various levels of editing. I have this story set at ten chapters for the moment, as that is what I have planned, but it might go a little longer than that depending on how wordy I get. 
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who took the time to read this, I appreciate all of you, and if you have anything you want to fight me about you can take it up with me over at [**dexondefense**](dexondefense.tumblr.com). Or you could just come say hi, whatever.


	2. Ransom and Holster and Ransom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who indulged me with this ridiculous idea and thank you to everyone who left comments and kudos, you're all lovely.

Eric hadn't had a concrete idea of what he had been imagining, not really anyway. Maybe more stark walls and shiny chrome surfaces, the smell of disinfectant and perhaps an unidentifiable clicking sound that he could never find the source for and that slowly drove him mad, day after day. 

Okay, maybe he had thought about it a little.

For all the scenarios he had pictured, this was not one of them. The room he found himself standing in looked almost homey, distinctly lived in, and far from sterile. It was like he had stepped through the door and straight into another reality. The eerie feel of the underground base was almost instantly forgotten as he tried to take in his new surroundings. In another world, he felt like it may have been a living room. 

Most importantly, however, it was inhabited. 

The first thing Eric was struck by was the fact that all five of his roommates were almost a foot taller than him. The second was that four of them were the exact same person. 

Three of the boys sat on a couch, their backs to him as they were obviously engrossed in some video game involving fancy cars flipping over one another and guns being fired. The only variable in the group, an unreasonably tall blond, jolted hard to the right and knocked into one of the quadruplets, causing his car to spin out. “Fuck all of you and your multiple cheating asses!” He cursed, identifying himself as the source of the shout that Eric had heard through the wall. He had the kind of voice that Eric was certain could be heard through multiple walls. 

“I’m not cheating. I’m being resourceful,” argued the jostled brother, knocking the blond back again with a hard elbow. 

To his left another quadruplet reached over, trying to smack his controller out of his hand. “You’re the one who’s cheating, Holtz!”

“THIS IS CHEATING. RIGHT NOW. THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE DOING.” 

Behind the couch there was an oddly out of place table, deep scuffs in its wooden surface. Two more brothers sat on it, one laughed into his beer as another fight broke out on the couch. Cars careened in impossible flips and crashes on the screen. 

Of all the bizarre things Eric thought he had prepared himself to see, quadruplets were not one of them. Briefly he wondered if their birth had been an experiment, then he wondered if that was a rude thing to wonder. For another panicked moment he wondered how he was ever going to tell the completely identical brothers apart. They all had the same even dark skin and close-cropped hair. They were all even…wearing the same clothes? Yes, they definitely had matching jeans and the same red and white snapback on each of their heads. And they were all so… _big_. The brothers all had to be over six feet tall each and the matching tee shirts they all were wearing left no room to question the muscles they were all carrying. He couldn’t get a good view of the blond, but sitting down he still looked even bigger than the brothers and Eric wasn’t sure he was ready to see how tall he actually was.

Eric had never felt smaller in his life. 

He took a hesitant step forward, grimacing only slightly as he took in the stained and worn carpet. It was nothing, however, compared to the ancient and sagging green couch the boys had currently parked themselves on. Mysterious stains seemed to make up more of the couch than not, and Eric wasn’t sure if green was actually its original color. In stark contrast to the debilitated state of the couch, the television had to be one of the most expensive he had ever been in the presence of. Sleek and huge it hung on the wall, connected by no wires or equipment that he could tell. The image on the screen was bright and in such high definition he found it hard to look at for too long. Beneath it, piled so high Eric was certain it was a hazard, was a mountain of video game and movies, of all genres and for all systems. 

He wasn’t sure why that did it, but something about the combination of the biohazard couch and the high-tech television had him spiraling again. Fear was gripping him around the neck and threatening to pull him under. He lived here now. This was it. 

Eric took a shuddering breath. This wasn’t the time for fear. 

He had survived aliens and high school and that time no one told him his sweater was inside out the whole day. He could handle this. Clearing his throat he steeled his nerves and gave a small wave. “Hello!” 

Unfortunately, steeling his nerves didn’t do much of anything apparently, as his voice was instantly lost in the chaos of the shouting players and their chaotic game which seemed to have no rules at all. Frowning a bit more out of annoyance now than uncertainty, Eric readied himself to try again, but was cut off as a bottle of beer was suddenly in his face.

Yelping in what he would later remember as a highly undignified manner he nearly leapt back into the hallways in surprise. 

“Whoa, whoa, easy man!” The boy offering the drink laughed, holding the bottle up in a sigh of surrender. “I come in peace! Was just seeing if you wanted a drink.” 

Blinking quickly and trying to get his heart rate under control Eric finally focused in on the fifth boy – _how had he not noticed him before_ \- and came to yet another realization. 

Not quadruplets. Quintuplets. 

“Uh…”

“Yo, Holtz!” The brother yelled at the couch, and Eric scrambled to catch the beer as it was tossed carelessly to him. 

“What?” Holtz, the blond as Eric had gathered, responded, not looking over from the screen. From their place at the table, the remaining brothers not playing the game looked up. 

“New guy!” One of them cried, throwing his hands up and flashing the same grin as the other two. They were a handsome group, Eric had to give them that, with their strong jaws and wide white smiles, all three turned on him at once was a little much to handle. 

“Oh shit,” exclaimed another, dropping his controller and almost throwing himself over the back of he couch so he too was pinning Eric in place with his smile. Maybe this was why they here. If all five turned their attention to you at once, you died. 

“Hey man!” Holtz finally half turned, flashing Eric a friendly half smile as he tried to greet their new roommate and keep his eyes on the game at the same time. 

“Hello!” Eric finally managed, raising his hand again in his little wave, hoping his smile seemed friendly and not in any way alarmed. “I’m Eric Bit-“ his sentence trailed off as something odd happened. The two brothers who had been relaxing on the table seemed to glitch. It was the only word Eric’s mind could come up with to explain the bizarre twitching of their forms, like they were holograms not quite behaving. One had his leg propped up on the back of the couch, the other a bottle of beer in his hand. The glitch only lasted a second but when they settled back, there was only one on the table, one leg up on the couch and a beer in his hand. “Uh…” Eric froze in place, hand still in the air as he tried to rationalize what he had just witnessed. 

“Eric Bit?” The brother closest to him asked and Eric’s eyes were probably a hair too wide as he stared at him, waiting for him to glitch out too. 

“I think he said Bits.”

“Uh, no, I’m, um, Eric Bittle.”

“Are you sure man? You don’t sound too certain,” Holtz joked from the couch, his booming voice all ready becoming recognizable over the unusual brothers’. 

“It’s all right, Bits, we all get confused sometimes.”

“Ha,” Eric breathed out, trying to recover himself and his senses. “Yeah-“ Only to be stopped once more by the changing scene in front of him. Now there was only one brother on the couch, three left in the room, but maybe the ever-changing number of identical siblings wasn’t so much an issue as _Holtz_. 

Holtz had also abandoned the game, apparently finding Eric more interesting and had turned himself fully around on the couch. His original impression of Holtz had been incorrect, he was not an attractive blond athlete. 

He was half of an attractive blond athlete. 

Eric wasn’t sure if he had been on his way to becoming a person or going in the opposite direction but either way it looked like someone had gotten bored with the science project named Holtz halfway through and given up. The strong jaw Eric saw from the side sloped halfway up the right side of his face before it gave way to hard chrome. Two other pieces of metal overlapped in different shades across his cheek, bent into shape to try to replicated a human cheekbone and finish off the parts of his nose and temple that weren’t covered in skin. The details were hard to make out, but Eric could see ribbons of color sliding across the shiny surface, like electrical wires spreading out across the curve of his false cheek and disappearing back under his skin.

Farmer had braced him for the possibility of more Lizard People, but he wasn’t sure he had quite considered all possibilities of roommates. 

Eric cleared his throat again, chanting a mantra in his head to keep himself as polite as possible. He couldn’t tell from his distance but it looked like Holtz didn’t have an ear on his right side, and it looked like maybe a piece of his right eye wasn’t organic. It was highly possible that nothing about Holtz was organic, and that was a realization that Eric wasn’t sure he was prepared to handle just yet. 

_Don’t stare. Don’t stare. Don’t stare_. “Yeah, Eric Bittle from Georgia. What are, what are your names?”

“They call me Holster,” Holtz-now-Holster introduced, his grin wide even as the expression caused the skin connecting the metal and his lips to pull awkwardly. 

“And we’re Ransom,” the three remaining brothers told him eerily perfect unison, the closest one holding out a hand for him to shake.

“Uh,” Eric commented for at least the tenth time since he had met The Impossible Ransom and Holster, shaking the hand extended to him. “All of you?” 

The four of them laughed at his obvious confusion, and then the glitch happened again. The two Ransom’s farthest from him twitched in that way where none of their limbs moved but they flickered and suddenly there was only one dropping his leg off the couch, an empty beer bottle on the table, and walking towards Eric. 

“Yeah,” the original one that had handed him the beer grinned, taking a step back to meet the approaching Ransom. Glitch. Jump. One Ransom was left in the room, holding the beer. “All of us.” 

For a full ten seconds Eric stared at the boy grinning down at him, trying to ignore Holster’s twisted smile still watching him from the couch as he began to piece everything together. “There’s only one of you. You can duplicate yourself,” he decided finally, eyes wide and unable to keep the awe out of his voice. 

Ransom beamed with pride, obviously pleased with himself as he took an exaggerated bow. “Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here for an indeterminate amount of time.”

“You’ll be here forever if you don’t quit showing off,” Holster called from the couch, his grin undercutting any harshness to his words. 

“I’ll be here forever because your robot ass keeps short circuiting everything with a battery it comes in contact with.”

“Fuck you, that wasn’t me last time and you know it!”

“Fuck you I spent hours working on that presentation!”

“You were not, you were looking up Brazilian porn again, why are you always fucking lying?”

“I TOLD YOU THAT WAS A VIRUS.” 

“THAT YOU CLICKED.” 

“SO WHERE ARE THE OTHER GUYS?” Eric interjected, raising his voice to try to shout over the bickering two before he got forgotten entirely in the mix. 

Ransom and Holster glanced up and Eric’s suspicions that he was being forgotten were reinforced by the dazed looks on their faces. “Uh, well, Jack’s in class right now and Shits is doing something fucking weird in his room, and Johnson is, you know…” He shrugged, making a vague hand gesture that seemed to mean _everywhere_ which only served to put Eric on edge. 

“He’s _where?_ ” 

“Rans I think you broke one of the controllers again.”

Ransom groaned, leaning back on his heels and ignoring Eric’s question. “You broke it.” 

“No way, this one was one of yours.” Holster stood up, reaching over the back of the couch to show his friend the apparently busted controller. Eric had been right about both the excessive height and the lack of a right ear, and now he could see the strips of metal running along his right arm, overlapping and crossing with the flesh in a disturbing mosaic that disappeared underneath the sleeve of his shirt. The same pattern continued up his neck and Eric looked away to stop himself from trying to count the thin wires running underneath his hair and beneath the collar of his shirt. 

“You still probably broke it.”

“What did you mean Jack’s in class?” Eric interrupted again, feeling less rude and more like this might be the only way to communicate in this facility. 

“Class, dude,” Holster elaborated unhelpfully. When he shrugged there was a quiet screech of metal grinding on itself and it took every ounce of Eric’s self control not to wince. “History of something I think.” 

“History of Something, taught by Agent Foxtrott on Wednesday and Fridays,” Ransom confirmed with a nod and a grin shot back at Holster. Holster made to punch his arm and missed. 

“Like, college classes?” Eric pressed. 

“Yeah,” Ransom confirmed. “They’ve got everything down here man, not really any reason to leave. Get your degree and everything.” Ransom tapped the glass of his own bottle against Eric’s before taking another drink. 

Trying to be polite, Eric attempted to twist off the top off of the bottle, before realizing it was not in fact a twist top. Before he could consider his next move, Holster was plucking the bottle from his grasp. “Rans is getting his in biology. Gonna do experiments on himself or something.” Without any effort at all, Holster slid his thumb along the bottle and pushed the cap off. He shot Eric a grin, leaving him so disoriented by how _huge_ Holster was, that he almost missed when Holster readjusted the skin along his thumb from where the cap had shifted it out of place. 

“How long have you guys been here?” He asked to stop himself from asking something worse.

Ransom was walking away, further into the bizarre little home underground. For the first time, Eric tried to take in the rest of the place. There was a set of stairs leading up to another floor, and another hallways disappearing around the corner. 

“Uh, like three years?” 

Holster nodded when Ransom looked at him. “Yeah, you got here 34 months, two weeks, six days, 3 hours-“

“Okay, okay he gets it,” Ransom waved Holster off as he disappeared through an open archway. 

“What about you?” Eric asked Holster as he started to follow Ransom, unable to withhold his curiosity about his new environment. 

“A while,” Holster told him with a smile and a hard pat on the back. “It’s not so bad here though. Everyone is real jumpy at first. Give it a few weeks and Haus will be home.” 

“House?”

“ _Haus_ ,” Holster corrected, like it meant something. “It’s what we call this place.”

“Like…the whole base or-“

“No,” Holster rolled his eyes, not necessarily in sync, but there was a fond edge to his smile. Or maybe it was just the way the metal was pulling it. “Samwell is its own monster. Haus is just what we call our portion of it.”

“Oh.” Eric had a thousand more questions, and only half of them had to do with duplication and robotics. “Well, I’m only going to be here-“ Eric cut himself off as they passed under the archway, and he felt his chest tighten in shock and disbelief. 

They were in a kitchen. A real, honest to whatever gods may or may not exist in this new world, kitchen. Ransom, still only one of him now, was leaning up against a pale yellow refrigerator that Eric suspected might have been white at one point. For just a moment though, his excitement over the kitchen was overshadowed as he found himself looking at the impossible. Well, maybe nothing was impossible anymore. 

“Is that a window?” He gasped, gaping out the tiny little pane above the sink. Stained white curtains hung around the old glass, fluttering in a light breeze. Eric was in front of it in a second, eyes and mouth wide as he looked out into the scene. It was a field, an old oak tree standing a few feet out. A handful of deer were grazing farther away. 

“Don’t get too excited, it’s artificial.” Holster leaned over his head, reaching out an arm to push the glass panes aside. His arm made it about a foot out before he stopped, hand going flat as the image flickered. “We’re 50 stories underground dude, no real wildlife down here.” 

Ransom shrugged. “Sometimes there’re rats.”

Eric felt his heart drop, but he tried to put a smile back in place. Obviously it was an illusion, but for a just a moment he had felt a little bit less sick. He grinned at Holster, trying to force himself to focus back on his original excitement over the kitchen. The look Holster gave him was sympathetic, or maybe that was just the metal again.

The black and white tile that covered the floor was scuffed and scraped, and Eric realized the table in the living room must have been commandeered from here. 

Eric’s mood snapped quickly back into place, the unsettling feeling he got from the window forgotten as he focused in on the Holy Grail he found himself unable to look away from. 

“Y’all have an oven?” He asked, voice nearly cracking under the sudden weight of the realization.

“Sure do.”

“Did he just say y’all?” 

“Does it work?” Eric asked, his voice almost revenant, hands clasped across his chest as he approached the appliance like it was a wild animal, about to spook and bolt out of the room at any moment. 

“Uh, I think so. We’ve made bagel bites a few times.” 

“Nursey tried to make some sort of vegan bread shit one time. One time.” 

“I thought all bread was vegan I still don’t really get that.” 

“Neither did Nursey apparently. Or the curtains.” 

Eric had no idea who or what Nursey was or how vegan bread worked, and at that moment he could not have cared less about either of those things. 

There was a working oven that he had access to. 

Instantly he was at the cabinets, pulling back the ancient doors in search of anything he could use. Behind him, he could feel what felt like more than just two sets of eyes watching him explore in a frenzy. 

“What cha’ lookin for?” Holster asked after a moment, sounding amused as Eric opened yet another cabinet filled with nothing but Sriracha sauce. If that was what robots ran on, science fiction movies had gotten it drastically wrong. 

“Where do you…” Eric trailed off, turning back to Holster and Ransom (now two of him again) waving his hand around to try to explain himself before he could think of the words. “Where does the Sriracha come from?” He finally managed. 

“Store,” the Ransom on the right told him. 

“It’s down in the Main,” Left Ransom said like that explained it. 

Eric felt a little like questions were the only sentences he could speak in, and so he chose not to continue the trend for the moment. “Okay.” He nodded, surveying the empty cabinets. There were a few cooking utensils, mostly old and a few needed to be disposed of immediately, but he was going to need to replace them first. “I’m going to need bowls, measuring cups, at least three bags of flour, probably even more sugar, strawberries, blue berries-“

“What are you talking about?” 

Hands on his hips, pulling himself up to his full 5’7” height and staring at the two mutant giants looking down at him, Eric told them. “I’m going to make a pie.”

For a second, the other men simply stared at him, before Right Ransom tilted his head. “Dude, what did they _do_ to you in D-con?” 

“I’m down for pie,” Holster interrupted before Eric could ask what D-con was. 

“You are a waste of pie, you don’t even need it,” Left Ransom scolded. “I, on the other hand, need so much food and you need to stop being greedy.” 

“Ah, yeah,” Holster leaned back against the wall. Somehow, next to Holster the doorway looked almost adorably small. “I forgot you’re eating for like five.”

“Stop saying it like that. Sounds like I’m pregnant.”

“Dude, I would be the most supportive father ever to all four of our sons.”

“What? Why are you the father?”

“Dude.” 

“ _I’VE GOT IT!_ ” 

Eric jumped, grabbing the counter for balance as somewhere above them a door slammed back on its hinges and a new voice rang out through the Haus. 

“I’VE GOT-where the fuck are you guys?” 

“In here Shits!” Holster called out, taking a step back from the doorway just as the newcomer threw himself through it. 

Eric’s third (fourth? He wasn’t entirely sure how to count Ransom) roommate was a wonder to behold in and of himself, but for all that Eric could tell, he seemed…human. 

He was taller than Eric, but not in the status of giant that Ransom and Holster occupied, and his hair was longer than Eric’s mother’s. He sported a thick mustache on his upper lip, a pair of old grey boxer shorts, and nothing else. If he was made uncomfortable by the arrival of a new member in their Haushold in his state of undress, he certainly did not show it. His lack of clothing choices awarded Eric the privilege of checking for anything out of the ordinary, but he could see nothing in the way of scales, feathers or gills. What he could see, was the patchwork of scars working their way across his arms, chest, and legs. Thin scars, thick scars, jagged and smooth, dark almost inky looking lines, along with white and angry pink crisscrossed across his entire body. Eric had no idea what had happened to him, but it didn’t look like it had been pleasant. 

The man, however, seemed undisturbed by the state of his skin as he beamed at them all. Perched on one arm, rather precariously Eric thought, was a laptop sporting a swirling sort of brand symbol that Eric had never seen before. 

Shits (was that his name? That was ridiculous) crossed the room, and looked about to put his laptop down before seeming to realize there was nothing to put it on. “Where the fuck is the table?” 

“It’s in the living room.”

“Why?”

“Wanted to sit.”

“We have a couch!” 

“That’s not enough room for all of me!”

“There is one of you,” Holster interrupted. 

“Don’t start-“

“OKAY I DON’T CARE!” Shits waved them off, moving to sit the laptop on the counter instead. “But listen, I’ve got it.” He turned to Eric, holding out a hand like he was speaking to him as much as Holster and Ransom, not even seeming to care that they had never met before. “See, those cock faces are going to have to let me speak at the next conference, because if they don’t I’m just gonna start screaming in the halls-“

“ _Again_.”

“-Because I am going to fucking _destroy_ their proposal on off world immigration policy because what the actual fuck are they trying to pull with that bull shit? Like we’ve been an asylum for decades and now they’re trying to pull this back tracking tariff-“ 

Eric had no idea what he was talking about. Whether Ransom and Holster did or not was up for debate, as they had checked out the moment the impassioned man’s back had been turned and it looked like they were silently trying to play hangman. 

The pause in the tirade currently being thrown at him went on for just a beat too long before Eric realized he needed to say something. “Oh! Yeah! That sounds great.” 

The mustachioed man grinned at him, wide and pleased before closing his laptop. “I know man. They’re not gonna know what hit ‘em.” Resting one hip against the counter he extended his hand. “Shitty Knight.” 

“That’s his name, he’s not just a horrible horseman.”

“I’m sure he’s that too, don’t put him in a box Rans.” 

“Your first name is Shitty?” Eric asked, trying as hard as he could to sound conversational and not flabbergasted. 

For his part, Shitty seemed undisturbed by every vague insult being hurled his way, and let out a barking laugh, shaking his hair about his face. It really was pretty impressive. “Not legally I guess, but not much happens fucking legally down here anyway, does it?” 

Eric shook his hand, his own laugh more nervous than genuine. Despite the ominous air about that statement, there was something about Shitty that Eric liked, something that made him feel a little safer in his new location. 

“Wait, Knight!” Eric blurted suddenly, feeling his face heat up as Shitty’s eyebrows arched. “You’re uh, you’re supposed to be my guide? Or something?” 

Shitty grinned, looking pleased with himself for some reason. “Yep, that would be me, man. Samwell Laboratories and Testing Facilities Official Fucking Tour Guide.” 

“ _Sltfcoftg_ ,” one of the Ransoms tried to sound out.

"I think that's a town in Wales," Holster said.

“You should get business cards,” Ransom told Shitty. 

“I’m working on it.” 

“So, when do we go?” 

Shitty glanced back up at Eric, raising in eyebrow as if he didn’t understand the question. “Like when are you getting the semi-grand tour here? I guess tomorrow. That’s when you start Testing right?” 

Testing. Eric felt the color drain from his face as the thought about it. He didn’t know what it consisted of, or what was going to happen, but he had a feeling it couldn’t be good when he could consistently hear the capital T in the word Testing. 

For the first time since Shitty had entered the room, Eric saw his face change from something other than wild delight. Eric thought it might have been sympathy. “Hey man, don’t look like that, it’s not gonna be that bad, really.”

“Yeah, they’ll take some blood, make you do some weird shit and call it a day,” Holster offered. 

“Yeah man, they only dissemble a handful of people,” A Ransom agreed. 

“You’ll probably keep like, 95% of your organs.” 

“87% at the least.”

“At the _least_.”

Eric swallowed. 

“You look fucking exhausted man,” Shitty interjected, clapping a hand on his back and sending him stumbling. “Come on brah, let’s get you to your room.” 

Eric nodded, waving a halfhearted goodbye to Ransom and Holster and Ransom. It was returned with far more enthusiasm. 

Shitty was still talking, rambling about the layout of the Haus, and Eric should have been listening. He was listening, really, but Holster’s voice carried easily, even when it sounded like he was trying to whisper.

_“If we count Nursey, he makes six.”_

Something about the statement, even though he had no idea what he was talking about, made Eric uneasy. He made six inhabitants of the Haus, but something deep in his gut told him that wasn't what Holster was talking about. 

_Six what?_

Shitty seemed not to have heard, and as they made it to the top of the stairs, Eric found himself transfixed by almost everything instantly. There were five doors lining the hall, three with ornate golden nameplates adorning them, as well as a myriad of other notes and posters stuck to each one. Eric didn’t have much time to appreciate the details. From the door to their right- decorated with a bright golden plate that said KNIGHT and a lewd stick figure drawing- there was suddenly a crash. Shitty’s tangent was derailed and he dropped back quickly into what might have been a fighting stance. 

“Shit fuck, all right, I have to deal with this, your room is at the end of the hall. You’re sharing with Johnson. If you have any questions let me know!” The last of the sentence was shouted to him as Shitty threw open the door, giving Eric a brief glimpse of a horrifically messy disaster of a bedroom before the door was slammed shut. From the other side there was the sound of Shitty screaming (yodeling?) and a series of crashes and curses. 

Eric decided to leave him to it. 

Taking a deep breath, Eric continued his journey through the hall. It wasn’t particularly long, and the wood beneath his feet looked worn. Lived in, he corrected quietly in his head. It wasn’t nice and it wasn’t beautiful, but it looked like a happy sort of place, if a place could be described like that. Eric could handle this, he could survive this. 

It was with this thought it mind that he tried to regulate his breathing as he passed the bathroom and arrived at the last door. On its plate the names read J. JOHNSON and just beneath it was E. BITTLE. It was one solid plate, his name and Johnson’s added at the same time, looking for all the world like it had always been there, just the same as the other boys’. It made Eric feel queasy, like his name etched in the metal meant he was here for the long haul, and not just spending a short vacation. 

Thoughts like that weren’t going to get him anywhere, he reminded himself. 

On his door there were a few notes posted as well, a few various threats for Johnson to stop _‘fucking with shit’_ as the writing put it, and he almost missed the tiny little note tucked in among the others. 

It was a small stick figure, smiling and perhaps waving with a flower doodled behind it. 

_“Welcome Eric!!!”_

The ridiculousness of the tiny welcome letter, the unexpected friendliness of it had Eric reeling. He didn’t realize he had started tearing up until he had to sniff, bringing a hand to his eye to try to stop the tears. He wondered if Shitty had made it. He was thankful they hadn’t drawn genitals on it.

Unable to hold in his curiosity, he turned again, ignoring the fake window at the end of the hall and instead focusing on the door directly across the hall from his. It also had two names written on its golden plate. The first name, Eric couldn’t read. Or at least he assumed it was a name, but it really could have been anything, since it wasn’t actually comprised of letters. Eric would have assumed it was a mistake, because it looked like small claw marks, slashed straight through the metal in random patterns, but the marks were as uniform as the letters, and as perfectly spaced out as all the other names. Beneath the bizarre scratches was the name J. ZIMMERMANN. 

It was the only door without a single extra note attached to it. 

Before Eric could continue his exploration of the hall, there was a creek behind him. Jumping nearly out of his skin he rounded on his door, finding it swinging open. The overhead light was on and the doorknob had turned, but there was no one there, no one but-

“Oh thank the Lord,” Eric breathed, rushing into the room as he spotted his bags, sitting on a bed that he assumed was to be his. The tiny room was everything he had expected from his college dorm, a little cramped with two twin beds, two desks, two closets and not much else. Despite the other name on the door, there were no signs of another soul living in the room. 

With that in mind, Eric felt comfortable pulling closed the curtain on the fake window along the far wall. 

“I think we’ll keep that closed,” he said out loud, half to himself and half to the item he was hunting through his bags for. “There you are.” It only took a minute for his rooting hands to meet with soft plush, and from within the depths of his backpack he withdrew Señor Bun. 

For a minute he simply stared at the silly stuffed rabbit, holding it tight in his hands as he felt an unasked for pressure behind his eyes once more. “No time for that,” he told Señor Bun, rubbing at his eyes with one hand as he sat the toy down on the bed. Someone had all ready made his bed, the pillows in their cases and sheets and duvet neatly arranged. He cast a wary gaze at the other bed, completely bare with only a set of sheets and pillow covers folded next to a naked pillow. He thought perhaps that was supposed to be his bed then, but it didn’t seem right that they would put all of his things on J. Johnson’s bed but-

Eric took one step towards the center of the room, trying to decide what the best course of action was, but stopped abruptly in his tracks, his back snapping completely straight. When he later tried to recall the moment, he could never quite explain what had happened, but a sudden burning clarity fell over him at once. 

“This is my bed,” he said out loud, looking to the made bed with all of his things piled on it. “That is Johnson’s bed,” he continued, glancing at the bare mattress. He stared at both for another second before the rigid posture he had set himself in gave way and he nearly collapsed with the change. 

“Well,” he gasped, grabbing at his bed’s frame. “I guess that settles that,” he told Señor Bun, giving a small laugh to try to quell his mounting fear at what had just happened. He knew he should begin to unpack, but he suddenly sound himself exhausted. 

He had been asleep for half the day all ready, but that nap hadn’t exactly been of his own free will. This was different now, with no one telling him to do and nothing being asked of him until tomorrow. Moving his bags on the ground he took a seat on the bed, picking Señor Bun back up and turning his soft ears over in his fingers. Suddenly, Eric felt incredibly and horribly alone. 

A prickle of tears didn’t resurface with the realization, only a hollow feeling in his chest that left him feeling lethargic and a little ill. He had no idea how his parents were fairing back home without him. Maybe Agent Hall really had wiped their memories. Before his thoughts could take him down a few very dark and winding paths with that particular scenario, he forced himself to lie down. When he woke up he would unpack and maybe figure a few more things about his new surroundings. For now, he just needed to sleep.

“Maybe it’ll be fun,” Eric told Señor Bun. “They seem nice, right? They can’t be worse than the boys in Madison, right?”

Señor Bun nodded his tiny head along with Eric’s fingers and Eric shot him a tired smile. 

“Yeah, nothing to worry about.”

**_X_ _X_ _X_**

Eric was roused from a dream about wild underground deer and medical experiments from a shout from upstairs. He hadn’t been aware that there was an upstairs, but it had definitely sounded like Holster.

Tucking Señor Bun under the covers – just in case – Eric made his way back down the hall, brushing his hair loosely in to place with his hand as he planned on a quick kitchen run for a glass of water. His phone, still sans service, told him it was nearing one AM. Granted, he had no idea where exactly which time zone they were in, but he figured it seemed vaguely accurate. 

The living room was quiet, the television off, and the only light coming from the kitchen. Upon entering, he found himself completely alone regardless. Maybe someone had left the light on accidentally, he reasoned. It took him a minute to locate a clean glass, and as the sink ran he found himself staring blankly out the faux window. The moon was bright and the sky was clear. It reminded him of the view from his Moomaw’s porch on summer nights. 

Before he could let that thought process get any more nostalgic, he heard the main door slide open. _Shitty_ , Eric thought, the other man’s presence already eliciting a sort of fondness from him. He pulled away from the window and his thoughts, meaning to head out into the living room to meet him.. 

“You’re-“ _out late_ , Eric had been about to say, but was stopped short as a horrible wave of dread spread over him. 

Something icy had taken hold in his chest, spreading out through his arms and legs and holding him in place as fear sent his heart pounding. Suddenly the quiet hum of the Haus felt eerily still, and he couldn’t remember how he had ever begun to think of this place as anything other than a trap, not when every inch of his body was suddenly screaming _‘DANGER! DANGER! DANGER!’_ like it was flashing in bright red lights before his eyes. 

Out in the living room he could hear someone shuffling around. He didn’t realize he was backing up from the doorway until his back hit the counter, hands shaking as he pulled a kitchen knife out of a drawer. He didn’t know how he knew, could never explain it, but it wasn’t Shitty, and he was in danger. 

Footsteps. Heavy and hard, getting closer and closer as Eric’s heart rate rose in sync. 

A shadow fell across the doorway and Eric was trembling, angry red marks on his fingers from clutching the handle too tightly. A monster was here, and it was going to eviscerate him and eat whatever remained. He was going to die in this underground chamber, and his parents would never know what happened to him. He was-

He was losing his mind. 

Standing in the doorway, watching Eric with sharp eyes was a man who couldn’t have been more than a few years older than himself, a backpack casually slung over one shoulder. He had a cap pulled down low over neat cut black bangs and a jaw Eric wouldn’t believe if he wasn’t looking at it himself. 

“Hello,” the stranger greeted, the corners of his mouth pulled down in a frown that seemed permanent on his face. 

Eric still couldn’t breath, that feeling of danger and death not even beginning to diminish as he tried to rationalize the sight before him. 

“Hi,” he finally managed, his voice drowned out by the sound of his blood rushing through his ears. What was happening? The man in the doorway looked human enough, and Eric could even see the smooth skin of his bare arms, sparing him of the scars that Shitty had. 

“I’m Eric,” he managed, uncertain as to how, but the words pushed past his lips and into the silence of the room.

He was human. He was human. He was human. 

“Jack.” He slurred the J, like it wasn’t quite a sound he was used to making.

Jack was not human and Eric had no idea how he knew. 

“Nice to meet you.” It wasn’t, but that would be rude to say. 

Jack nodded once in acknowledgment, the deep-set frown never once budging, before he stepped out of view. Eric heard the creek of the stairs as he ascended, the feeling of terror gripping at his heart fading as Jack’s footsteps trailed off. Upstairs he heard a door quietly open and close.

It has been the door across the room from his. It had to be, he was the only J. that Eric had been introduced to so far. 

Eric’s hands were still shaking, the glass in the sink behind him overflowing as the water poured down. It was another two minutes before he found the strength to turn it off and head back upstairs.

He was going to die down here, and Jack Zimmermann was going to kill him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I am available for comments and complaints at [**dexondefense**](http://dexondefense.tumblr.com/)


	3. Particle Breakdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Testing is the be said with a capital T. Shitty and Lardo are terrible tour guides.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After a stupidly long haitus I am back with another chapter from the Alien AU that no one asked for. This is the first chapter that was edited by no one outside of myself, so good luck to you all.

The third time Eric awoke at the Samwell base was the rudest thus far, as something slammed hard into his back and shot him into consciousness with a jolt of pain. 

Confusion cut through his haze of sleep as he found himself paralyzed, something heavy pressing down on him. He couldn’t move his arms or legs, trapped at his side as something soft was covering his face, constricting his breathing. 

“What-“ his speech was muffled, even the one word difficult to get out as something fluffy tried to press into his mouth. It was pitch black, no source of light to explain his horrific predicament. 

All of this took Eric about 30 seconds to comprehend before he started to scream. 

“HELP!” He struggled, fighting hard and finding quickly that he was not actually tied down. He was being crushed and suffocated simultaneously, something big and heavy keeping him locked in place. 

With a great effort he managed to get his right arm free, throwing it out to the side and managing to get his hand on the edge of whatever was holding him down. He pushed with all of his might, but one hand was not enough against the weight bearing down on him. His breathing was ragged, panic taking control as he fought desperately, straining himself with the effort. 

His hand was touching metal, he realized after focusing in for a moment; metal and then something soft on top. That part was easier to shift, but it still did him no good. He tried to move his legs, and quickly found that process much more difficult. His foot managed to move sideways, sliding out beneath his impromptu prison, and while his knee managed to make the journey with minor scraping, he knew there was no way the rest of him would be able to fit.

He was trapped under his bunk. 

The realization almost quieted the panic for a moment, giving way to complete confusion and disbelief as he put two and two together. Eric was in no way big enough to fit in the cramped space and didn’t understand how he had been able to make it under in his sleep. 

“HELP!” He tried again. “SHITTY! RANSOM! HOLSTER!” He wasn’t strong enough to move the bed on his own, couldn’t free himself despite his best efforts. “Help!”

Above him, the bed groaned and Eric froze. It shifted, as if someone was sitting on it but he felt no extra weight. For a moment he remembered Jack, that terrifying presence right across the hall and thought he was certainly going to be torn to shreds by that monster in a model’s body.

Eric was still unable to move as the bed groaned again, its legs scraping across the floor as it tilted to one side. Someone was lifting it by the frame, pulling it up on two legs to give Eric just enough room to slide himself free. He wasted no time in doing so, scuttling across the floor faster than he would have imagined himself capable of. He collapsed in a heap, panting for breath as he tried to steady his heart. Behind him, the bed slammed back down on all fours.

“Thank you so much, I have no idea-” Eric rolled on his back, ready to thank Shitty or Ransom or whoever, but was met with nothing but his empty room. 

Weariness forgotten, Eric shot straight up into a sitting position, scanning the dark room for any signs of life. The only other presence in the room was Senor Bun, now flopped onto his side after being tossed around in the excitement. The lights were still off, and the curtain drawn across the window only allowed a shred of light to escape out the bottom. 

Eric was alone in the room. 

“What in the…” Eric scrambled to his feet, spinning in a circle and feeling more and more ridiculous by the second. The bed had definitely been on top of him… _right_? He hadn’t just imagined that. There was no way it had been a weird waking nightmare. 

Unable to stand it a moment longer, he bolted. Throwing open the door he made a break for the hallway before some invisible force could drag him back in. He didn’t bother with Senor Bun and his current attire of his finest sweatpants and ancient camp tee shirt were the least of his concerns. He made it halfway down the stairs before he realized nothing was following him, and that he probably looked insane. 

Still, with his back against the wall he couldn’t help staring back up the hallway, his breathing heavy as he tried to get his bearings. 

From the kitchen he could hear his new roommates talking, their voices low and serious.

Eavesdropping was incredibly rude, Eric could hear his mother telling him in her scolding tone. Either let someone know you’re there or leave. It was the polite thing to do. Besides, he needed to tell the others what had just happened. They had to have some sort of explanation for his bizarre wakeup call. 

“I’m telling you, if we can convince Bitty, we would be almost there!” 

In Eric’s defense, his sweet and polite mother had never been 50 stories underground in a secret government holding facility, so he figured he could take a few liberties. As quietly as he could, Eric descended a few more steps, allowing him to better hear what was happening in the kitchen. 

“Jack doesn’t think we should ask him.” That was Ransom, sounding uncertain. 

“Yeah, I mean, look at him. We don’t even know what he can do yet. We might just be fucking over this poor kid’s life.” It sounded like there might have been more than one Ransom. 

“Or, or,” Holster interjected, “we might be improving it! We don’t know what they’re gonna find in Testing. Maybe he’s one of us.”

“I think we should wait until after his first round of Testing comes back, then we can talk about this.” Eric had no idea what was happening, but Shitty sounded confident in his decision. 

“Doesn’t matter if he agrees, we still need two more.” 

“One more.”

“Nursey isn’t going to help.”

“Nursey will help!” Shitty snapped, sounding tired, like this was not the first time this argument had occurred. “I promise you, he’s in.” 

“Why would he be in? He all ready has a pass.”

“Doesn’t matter, if Nurse and Bits are in, we still need one more.” 

Bitty and Bits had to be Eric, that much was obvious, but it was still odd to hear them refer to him as anything other than his first name. Maybe a new name down here was tradition. Shitty, Ransom and Holster all seemed like made up titles anyway. At least, Shitty wasn’t the name on Mr. Knight’s door. Eric had yet to find Holster and Ransom’s name plates, or the door that led to the mysterious attic. 

“I might have some leads.” The new voice was female, high and light, and Eric almost missed it among the rumbling argument that was occurring. It sounded familiar, but Eric couldn’t place it.

“What?! How could you just now be telling us this?” 

“Here…”

There was a shuffling and Eric realized they were moving, a shadow falling across the far wall as he was about to be discovered. Eric had a moment of deliberation, and considered retreating back up to his room, but that still didn’t feel safe. Instead he took the slightly less incriminating path, and continued his decent down the stairs. He was almost at the bottom when Agent Duan rounded the corner. 

If she was surprised by his presence, nothing on her stoic face showed it. He was not sure he could not say the same for his own attempt at nonchalance. 

“Good morning,” he greeted after a hesitant pause. The last time he had seen Agent Duan, she had drugged him with ginger ale. He tried not to think too long on that. 

“Well, look who’s conscious.” She slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans as she gave him a lopsided smirk. 

Before Eric had lapsed into a drug-induced unconsciousness on the plane, he distinctly remembered her straight backed posture and the no-nonsense steel in her voice. She had been in a professional pantsuit with her expensive sunglasses tucked into her collar. 

Compared to the tiny girl standing before him now, Eric wasn’t sure it was the same woman. Her close cropped hair seemed a little less organized as it casually fell across her forehead, and the paint stains on her jeans and the old strappy sandals she wore hardly seemed regulation. Everything about her seemed a little more at ease, a little more relaxed, and about a hundred times more human. 

Eric had stood next to her in Georgia, but she seemed so much smaller now without the air of cold government efficiency hovering around her. Or maybe it was just the six-foot tall monsters standing behind her that made her look so tiny. 

“Mornin’ Bitty!” A Ransom waved at him from behind Lardo. Eric waved back. 

“You’re not gonna drug me again, are you?” Eric attempted to joke, his tone coming across much more wary than teasing. 

Her grin only grew. 

“Depends if Lards’ likes you or not,” Shitty joked. His laugh was something closer to a bark as Agent Duan rolled her eyes. Shitty was barely more appropriately clothed than the day before, with a worn tee shirt and a pair of jean shorts Eric wasn’t sure even he would be able to pull off with confidence. His arms and legs were still lined with fading scars, deep and horrible looking and Eric willed himself to only look at Shitty’s face.

“Listen, there are a lot worse ways to get transported down here, count yourself lucky.” Agent Duan was small and human and relaxed, but Eric was positive she could kill him and still have plenty of energy to run another mission in the afternoon. 

Eric laughed uneasily. “Well, it’s, uh, it’s good to see you again Agent Duan.” 

The words were hardly out of Eric’s mouth before Agent Duan winced and Shitty, Holster and both Ransoms’ were screaming a chorus of _“AGENT DUAN!_ ”

“You can call me Lardo,” she corrected over their jeers with a tone that insinuated it wasn’t a suggestion. 

“Lardo,” he tried out, just to make sure he wasn’t being messed with. “Is that your first name?” He ventured, only to be met with another round of howling laughter and a sigh from Lardo. 

“Isn’t Bitty the best?” Holster demanded of Lardo, bending down nearly in half to clap a hand on her shoulder and laugh in her ear. Despite their size difference, Lardo seemed to take Holster’s added weight on her with ease. Eric couldn’t help but notice that when Holster smiled, some of his teeth were a shiny metallic. 

“He’s all right.” 

Shitty, Holster, Ransom, and Lardo. And now apparently, he was Bitty. 

“Dude, we’re running late,” Lardo chided, flipping her wrist to look at an expensive looking watch there. 

Shitty’s mood only seemed to get brighter at the problem. “Swaesome. All right Mr. Bitty, get dressed and get ready for the tour of your life.”

“Maybe even the last of your life,” one Ransom stage whispered.

“I’m kidding,” assured the other Ransom with a laugh as Holster waggled his one eyebrow. 

Eric-Now-Bitty offered up a weak smile, before casting an uncertain glance back up the stairs. Now was the time, he knew, to tell them of his ordeal with the bed, but something stopped him. What if that wasn’t normal? Well, obviously it wasn’t normal, but what if it was too not normal, even for Samwell? What if whatever had happened up there held him down here for longer than two weeks?

“Bitty? Yo, Bits!” 

Bitty jumped, glancing up at Holster’s worried face. The metal half was difficult to get around, but he was staring down at Bitty so much concern that he found it hard to find the metal giant frightening at all. 

“Yes, sorry, what?”

“We said, are you all right man? We lost you for a second there.” Shitty’s manic glee had calmed into something more subdued as he kept a watchful eye on Bitty. 

“Oh, yes, I’m fine.” 

He didn’t miss the way Lardo’s eyes narrowed before he turned to head back up the stairs. 

It was the fastest he’d ever gotten ready in his life, flying through his things as he tried to spend as little time in his room as possible, though nothing else out of the ordinary happened as he combed his hair and threw on some clean clothes. He was going to have to figure out eventually how to wash clothes here, but that was a problem for another time. 

Almost as soon as he was back at the bottom of the stairs one Ransom was nudging Bitty’s shoulder, while another was shoving something – a brown paper lunch bag, he realized – into his hand. 

“Have a good first day, sweetie,” Holster cooed, before he made a show of licking his one human hand and slicking Bitty’s hair down. He tried to duck under the assault, but failed and ended up with half a Mohawk courtesy of Holster spit. 

Bitty gasped, trying to right his hair again as Holster and the Ransoms laughed. Lardo grabbed his shoulder, dragging him away from his harassers and shoving him past Shitty and out into the hall. As the door slid closed behind them, the warmth of Haus faded, and the three of them were back in the hall Farmer had led him down yesterday. 

Had it really only been a day?

“So, where are we going?” 

“Main,” Shitty told him as they headed down another identical grey corridor. 

Main. It was the same answer Holster had given him when he had asked about the Sriracha cupboard. 

“Can we buy things down there? Like-“

“Dude, you can get or do anything down in Main. It’s like, a whole fucking town.” 

“Samwell USA. Population, Classified,” Lardo deadpanned with a smirk. 

Shitty laughed, throwing an arm unexpectedly around Bitty’s shoulders, jostling him hard as a wall panel slid back and they entered another tiny elevator. “Yeah, Lards knows all about the classified shit, but her lips are fucking sealed man. Ain’t nothing getting out of that goddamn steel trap.” 

Lardo leaned against the wall, her eyes falling closed as they began to descend. Bitty would have thought she wasn’t even listening if it wasn’t for the small quirk at the corner of her mouth. 

For a moment they lapsed into a comfortable silence, Shitty’s arm still tight around his shoulders and Lardo quietly humming something under her breath as she rested her head against the wall. There were no floor numbers or flashing lights to let them know where they were going, but neither Shitty nor Lardo seemed concerned. 

Even in a city made of secrets, Bitty didn’t feel right about his own. He wanted to know what had happened to him that morning, and he wanted to know what they had all been conspiring about before he arrived. Maybe it wasn’t the time though, maybe after his tests had come back. Then again, his mother always said-

He couldn’t remember what his mother had said, because at that moment the wall behind him gave out. 

It did not actually give out, he told his rapidly beating heart as it tried to escape his chest. The dull grey had given way to glass, and beyond that glass he could see it. All of it.

“Welcome to Main.” Lardo’s voice came from somewhere behind him, but he barely heard her over his own shock at what he was looking at. 

Stretching out beneath them, at least 20 stories, was what Bitty could only describe as a small city. For as far as he could see in either direction there was a wall of elevators, just like the one they were in, rushing up and down from the bustling chaos happening below. It was like a straight pit, with elevators for walls and a town for a floor. There were streets and buildings and what looked like a few parks scattered throughout. None of the buildings were very tall, and Bitty could see the ceiling, looming above, dark and solid with what must have been thousands of lights keeping the city from plunging into darkness. Most shocking of all, beyond the mismatched trees popping up at random intervals and the unorganized cluster of buildings and looming ceiling, was the River.

Bitty didn’t know its name but he knew it needed to be capitalized. It was massive, cutting a harsh path with white frothing water through the center of the city, going whichever way it pleased. There was no doubt in his mind that it had been here before Samwell had been established and would be here long after it was gone. 

“Level, Main Three,” The Elevator announced for the first time without warning as the elevator stopped, making Bitty jump.

“All right man, you ready?” Shitty asked, obviously not expecting an answer as he gave Bitty a nudge out of the elevator. 

Bitty managed not to stumble, clutching the brown paper bag Ransom had handed him tight in his hands until it crinkled. All around him was too much to take in. There were indeed roads, as he had seen before, but not on their level. Main Three, the elevator had announced, and now he understood why. What he had originally taken for as just street chaos was in fact multiple levels of catwalks and elevated platforms, all crisscrossing one another and looking down on those below. Above them, maybe fifteen feet were more lights, hanging from what Bitty could only assume was Level Four. Above them as he saw a group of people walk across what looked like nothing at all, but must have been a glass floor.

Lardo might have said something, but Bitty wasn’t listening. He moved instead to lean over the nearest railing to look at the levels below them. Along the bottom, beneath what he counted as Level One, was the river. It looked even more menacing and imposing from this close. It also looked like it might be steaming, with windows along the water way covered in a thin layer of condensation. 

“Come on man, we can go down there later, for now I’m fucking starving and we should get lunch.” 

“Lunch, yeah.” Bitty’s eyes didn’t leave the river until he was pulled backwards, Lardo’s grip tight on his shoulder. 

“You should chuck that bag, by the way. I’m sure they tried to make you a sandwich, but I guarantee you it’s toxic.” 

Bitty looked down at the bag in his hands, making sure to stay close to his two guides as they headed down the nearest catwalk. It gave way quickly to a larger platform, and he was unable to see the ground below them, which made it slightly easier to concentrate on more important things. He resisted the temptation to continue looking up. 

“That was nice of them,” he decided finally, opening the bag to examine the contents. Against his best attempts, he felt his face contort into a grimace as he quietly closed the bag again. Lardo raised a knowing eyebrow as she met his eye. “Well, it was still a nice thought.” 

Bitty followed Lardo’s advice with only a small twinge of guilt as he dropped the bag off in the nearest trashcan. 

Main, it turned out, did indeed have everything anyone needed for being trapped a few miles underground. They passed a few clothing stores, a pretentious looking coffee shop, and a hardware store selling Bitty had no idea what. Beyond the customers in jumpsuits and lab coats, with too many eyes or a tail here or there, it all looked…normal. He wasn’t 100% certain, but it looked like there might be a Starbucks down on the corner. 

“Come on,” Lardo gave him another tap on the shoulder as they led him into a large domed building. 

“I thought we were getting food first.” Bitty felt his heart leap into his throat as they passed a duo wearing protective facemasks that obscured all of their features. The building they were headed into looked important and dangerous; all shiny surfaces and chrome walls. 

Until it wasn’t. 

Before Bitty could fully panic about his impending Tests, the plain walls and sterile looking surfaces gave way to neon signs and dirty looking tables. The tables in question were all crowded in the middle of the wide room, ringed on the outskirts by various stalls and open windows, all advertising the best deals and freshest food. 

“Is this…Is this a _food court_?” Bitty asked as Lardo and Shitty led the way to a free table, throwing themselves down in chairs as they claimed their spots. 

“Yeah, brah, what do you want?”

“Looks like Nemo’s is having a deal on large pizzas.”

“Yo, I want like six.” 

“You cannot eat six pizzas.”

“Is that a fucking challenge Agent Duan?” 

Lardo rolled her eyes. “You good with pizza Bits?” 

“Uh.” Bitty sunk down in the nearest seat, trying to look at everything all at once. At the top of the dome there was a huge panel of glass, looking up at the layers of levels above them and all the way to the city’s ceiling. A few feet from them, a girl with blue skin and hair that looked like tentacles was handing out cupcakes to her friends. Behind them a guy with three eyes, none of which in the traditional locations, was chugging some sort of slushie as his friends cheered him on. Of everything Bitty had dreamed and feared about Samwell, the possibility of eating pizza in felt like a mall food court had not been accounted for. 

“Yeah, pizza is good.” At the word, he heard his stomach growl. He hadn’t realized how hungry he had been. 

Lardo grinned, which was to say the corners of her mouth twitched vaguely upwards. “All right, two larges it is.” 

“Three,” Shitty corrected, and before Lardo could say another word he was suddenly standing on his chair and screaming, “JACK!” 

At least three tables around them jumped in shock. The guy with too many eyes choked on his drink and the blue girl screamed in surprise. Across the cafeteria, Bitty saw a tall figure stumble, before glancing quickly around for the source. 

Had Jack simply passed through the living room the night before and not introduced himself, Bitty still would have recognized him for the same figure as he approached. Bitty felt his heartbeat quicken, his palms slick on the tables grimy surface and that same instinct screaming at him to _‘Run’_! as Jack weaved his way through the tables towards them. 

Bitty jumped as a hand rested on his shoulder. With her other hand, Lardo waved at Jack, who waved a little hesitantly back. She patted Bitty’s arm, leaning down close so Shitty couldn’t hear, not that he was paying attention. He was still standing on his chair, waving his arms like he was directing airplanes. 

“Try to relax, he’s not dangerous.” 

Bitty opened his mouth, wanting to ask a million questions, but Lardo was disappearing back through the crowd. Bitty’s attention was drawn sharply away from her as his heart threatened to beat out of his chest, a wave of dread rushing up the back of his neck and threatening to paralyze him in his seat.

“Hey,” Jack greeted as he arrived at the table. Under the harsh florescent lighting, Jack looked less frightening than he had the night before, and Bitty tried to will the creeping terror away. There was that same hard set to his jaw and a coldness in his eyes, but something about him seemed maybe a little less harsh and a little more…awkward, maybe? Despite all of it though, Bitty couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe he should at least be holding a fork in self-defense. Even if it was a plastic one.

“JACK!” Suddenly Jack was dropping his bag, scrambling to catch Shitty as the other man flung his body at him 

When Jack swore, it sounded like rocks crumbling. 

“I missed you so much man, where you been?”

“I saw you this morning, Shitty,” Jack informed him, quietly placing him back down on the floor and pushing Shitty off as he tried to ruffle his hair. He was softening under the contact though, a tiny and strained smile at the corner of his mouth. It reminded Bitty of Farmer, the way she smiled though her face didn’t seem to want to let her. 

“That was so fucking long ago man.” Shitty whined, pretending to swoon. Jack didn’t try to catch him. Suddenly Shitty’s eyes fell on Bitty, like he had forgotten he was there. “Oh, yo, have you met Bitty?”

“Bitty?” Jack repeated, casting a cautious glance at Bitty who waved weakly. “Uh, yeah, we met last night.”

“What?” Shitty grinned, rocking back on his heels. “Bits you didn’t tell me you met the love of my life last night!”

“Sorry,” Bitty managed a small smile. “Didn’t know you felt so strongly about him.” 

“Of course I do,” Shitty chastised, attempting to lean in to give Jack a kiss on the cheek, but Jack shoved him off easily. 

Lardo returned before Shitty could retaliate. “All right, all right, bro love fest is over, I’ve got pizza.” 

“Uh, I should-“

“No way man, we got enough,” Shitty mumbled, somehow already shoving a piece into his mouth. Grabbing another slice he shoved it into Jack’s hands. 

“…Okay.” Jack, much to Bitty’s dismay, took the seat between him and Shitty. 

He met Lardo’s eye for only a second, but he didn’t think he imagined the hint of sympathy he found there. She slipped open the next box but all thoughts of food were forgotten for Bitty. He felt like he was going to be sick, his increasing panic making him feel ill, even as Shitty handed him a slice, completely unconcerned with what was happening inside Bitty’s head at the moment. How were they okay with this? How were they not running for their lives?

“So how was your mission?” Jack asked. Something about the words didn’t sound right, like his accent –which Bitty still couldn’t place- was fake and he was still learning the vowels. 

“Brah, she brought this little fucker back, so I’d say it went well.” Shitty winked at him, and Bitty tried for a smile as he lifted his own slice to his mouth. His stomach was still rolling but it wouldn’t do to seem rude. 

“No.” Jack shook his head. “Not Georgia, before that.” 

All eyes turned to Lardo as she ignored them for another moment, taking another bite like he hadn’t asked anything. After a moment she seemed satisfied and looked up. “Anomaly in Maine. It went fine.” 

“Yikes, that bad?”

“She said it was fine.”

“It was fine,” she insisted a little more sternly. “A little bit more than fine, I guess. I think I found you number seven.” 

Bitty’s concentration was still divided halfway to forcing himself not to just run away from Jack, but Lardo’s words brought him closer to reality. 

“Number seven of what?” 

Beside him, Jack and Shitty had gone completely still, giving Lardo looks he couldn’t identify. They had said earlier, when they thought he couldn’t hear, that he could be number six. This was the best opening he was going to get to find out anything. 

Lardo laid down her crust and focused on him, opening her mouth just as Jack and Shitty tried to cut her off. 

“Lardo-“

“Dude, I don’t know-“

“No.” Lardo silenced them both with a glance. “He should know.” She leaned forward, eyes shifting to the sides for a moment, as if worried they would be overheard. “Okay, you go in for testing today, and we don’t know what they’re going to find.” Bitty opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again as she narrowed her eyes. “Now, they might find nothing, and you’re stuck here for a few weeks and then you get to go home and pretend none of this ever happened. But, they might find something.”

“Like what?”

Lardo didn’t glare this time, allowing the question with a studiously blank face. “I have no idea. I read your report, but I’m not an expert on particle breakdown.”

“Particle breakdown?” 

Bitty jumped when Jack spoke, almost forgetting the creeping terror the other man instilled in him. He was at least glad someone else voiced the question, but neither of them received an answer as Lardo plowed forward. 

“If they find something, you’re going to be here a lot longer than two weeks.” She paused, and Bitty found he had nothing to say, anxiety creeping into his bones that had nothing to do with Jack. “And then, you’re gonna need a Pass.”

_“A pass?”_ Bitty meant to ask, but instead just stared straight ahead at Lardo. She was the one with all of the answers. If he was ever going to get out of here, he needed to pay attention. The ominous air surrounding that sudden ‘if’ was making him lose his appetite faster than Jack had.

“A Pass let’s you leave,” she explained. “Some people get them just by being able to blend in with normal society. They have different lengths of time, almost like a Travel Visa, sort of.”

“You pass the tests the right way, you get a Pass,” Shitty elaborated, speaking up for the first time. “You get to leave. At least for a little.” 

Bitty nodded, head swimming and stomach still tied in a knot. “Okay, so…what do you need seven people for?” 

“Seven is the bare minimum required for a Team.”

“A Team?”

“It’s the only loophole. If you can’t pass the tests and they won’t give you a pass, then you can still make it out with a Team.”

“Like…like a superhero team? Like the Avengers?”

“Avengers, Justice League, X-Men, everyone likes to call themselves something, but the bottom line is, if you can prove that you’re team is an asset, to Samwell and to the protection of humankind, you can get out.” Shitty looked less apprehensive now, leaning forward with a bit of sauce stuck to his mustache. “We have five of us all ready-“

“We have four.” Jack didn’t look up from his pizza. 

“We have five, and if you join that’s six.”

“We hope you don’t have to,” Lardo quickly assured him. “But if you do have to stay, we would like you to join us.” 

“Are, are you on the team?” 

The small quirk to Lardo’s mouth looked a little sad. “No, I’m not officially. I am the sponsor for this team though. Every one needs an Agent backing it.”

Bitty blinked at them all for a moment. “Wait. Wait, wait, wait. They can’t just“ -he waved his arms in the air- “keep me here! That’s…kidnapping! It’s illegal.” 

Jack rolled his eyes towards the ceiling as Shitty gave a humorless laugh. “Ah, man, what did I tell you guys? He’s the best.”

Suddenly the neon lights and the hum of activity around them didn’t seem so inviting. It felt like pressure. Like all that rock and dirt a mile above him was pressing down and forcing him further underground. Not even Jack’s looming presence was enough to overshadow the growing dread in Bitty’s stomach. 

Samwell was never going to let him leave. 

**_X_ _X_ _X_**

Despite Shitty’s promises, they hadn’t had time to explore more of Main before Lardo was ushering them back through the wall of elevators and up into the sterile tunnels once more. This one was more ominous than the living quarters, with large curved walls that far more deserved the title of tunnel than hallway. All along the route there were more elevators and heavy doors and stairs curving up and down as people rushed along. The door they stood in front of didn’t seem any different than the dozens that had passed, but Lardo and Shitty seemed confident this was where they needed to be. 

“If this goes-“ Bitty swallowed, trying once again to speak “If they find something, then I’ll join your team.” His voice sounded steadier than he could have hoped for as he stared at the large metal door before them. 

Behind him he heard Jack snort. 

Bitty resisted the urge to roll his eyes. That siren was still going off in his head, still warning him that Jack was danger and death, but it felt like it was starting to fade into background noise. It wasn’t lessening exactly, but Bitty found himself beginning to be able to tune it out. He had been in Jack’s presence for almost an hour now, and so far the most hostile Jack had appeared was in his rude disregard of any sort of assets Bitty had to offer. It was possible Jack wasn’t actually a monster, but just such a huge dick that it was making Bitty feel physically ill. 

Either way, Bitty would still make a strong case for not being left alone with him. 

Why Lardo had invited him to come to Bitty’s testing, he wasn’t sure of her intentions. Maybe she just didn’t like Bitty as much as he had originally thought she had. 

“We would be glad to have you on the team, brah,” Shitty assured with an arm around his shoulder, either ignoring or not hearing Jack’s disbelief. 

“But,” Lardo interjected, “we hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“Oh, yeah. Obviously.” 

Before Bitty could think too much on that, the door suddenly began to open. Began, because it did not seem to be an easy process for the enormous metal to complete. Above it, a light which Bitty had failed to notice previously was blinking in a sharp red pulse, a loud and constant beep echoing down the hall. Before the door could complete its journey, a young girl was leaning out around it, grinning broadly at them. 

She was taller than Bitty, with wide shoulders and a wide mouth and a mop of blonde curls pulled tight behind her head. In her hands she held a clipboard much like Farmer’s, but unlike Farmer she was sporting a pristine white lab coat, and there was a pair of solid black goggles covering her eyes. 

“Hello, Mr. Bittle?” Her grin didn’t falter as she glanced at the rest of his entourage. “Is Mr. Oluransi with you?” Her teeth were almost blindingly white.

“Nah, sorry March,” Lardo apologized, a lazy edge to her smile, like she knew something they didn’t. Granted, she probably knew many things they all didn’t. “Just me, Shitty and Jack are gonna be overseeing Bitty here.” 

“Bitty?” She asked. 

“Uh, yeah. That’s what they’re calling me.” 

March laughed, tilting her head back as her mouth pulled impossibly even wider. Bitty thought she was going to split her face in half. When she laughed it sounded closer to a cackle. Just as suddenly as she had started she snapped back into place. “Well, Mr. Bitty, we had better get a move on. Don’t want to take all day here!” 

Bitty was hardly through the door when the beeping began again, the door beginning its return journey the whole five feet to the other side as he and his new friends and Jack all followed March. The room they entered reminded Bitty of a hospital hallway. All along the stretch of sanitary and fluorescently lit hall were rooms, separated from the hall by flimsy curtains. Men and women and people who didn’t seem to be either bustled from room to room, all sporting lab coats and face masks and all clutching clipboards and barking orders to one another. March was all ready half way down the hall and turning a corner by the time the door closed behind Jack, and Bitty rushed as quickly as he dared through the quiet hall after her. 

He didn’t notice as he caught up to her that Jack, Lardo and Shitty hadn’t followed. A bubble of unease began to rise as March beamed at him, holding open one curtain and gesturing him in. At first Bitty had taken her smile for just her being friendly, but it didn’t seem to be receding…at all. It was steadily moving from kind to unsettling.

Bitty learned very quickly that March was not actually a doctor, but rather a nurse in training. As she asked him questions about how he was feeling and his bladder, and took his blood pressure and measurements, she never once stopped smiling, and never removed her black reflective goggles. As odd as she was, and as uncomfortable as he was handing over a urine sample to someone smiling so much, she was just as kind as Farmer had been, and he was beginning to wonder where his reptilian friend was. 

“Hello Eric.” 

Bitty jumped as the curtain pulled back, revealing a skinny middle-aged man, with thinning hair and the longest lab coat Bitty had seen yet. He was not looking at Bitty but rather at yet another clipboard in his hands.

“My name is Dr. Murray, I’ll be looking after you today,” he told Bitty, flipping a page and adjusting the thin glasses sitting on his face. 

“I-I thought March all ready did all of that.” Bitty had known it was futile, to think he could get out of this medical examination with as little as he was. Still, a guy could dream 50 stories underground. 

Dr. Murray glanced up then, and March tilted her head. There seemed to be some kindness in Murray’s stare, but maybe it was just in comparison to March’s unyielding grin. “Most of it yeah, we just really need a blood sample and then to run some scans.”

“That’s all?” Bitty breathed, trying not to get ahead of his own relief. 

Murray grinned then, sitting his clipboard down and taking the one from March’s outstretched hand. March opened her mouth wide again for another laugh that raised the hairs on Bitty’s arm. 

“Yeah, no organ removal for you today,” Murray joked lightly. “Just have to make sure everything came back together correctly.” 

Bitty frowned, his brow creasing in confusion at the statement. “What-“

“March, can you go see if room S238 is ready?”

“It is!” She exclaimed with far too much enthusiasm for the situation. “They said we are cleared whenever you are ready.”

Once more, before Bitty could ask any more questions, he was being hustled back down the hall. March and Dr. Murray were talking in short sentences with big words that he was personally convinced they had made up as they exchanged papers and shoved him along. 

When Bitty had been ten he had fallen out of a tree, straight onto his head and had to be rushed to the hospital. Everything then had been a little fuzzy, but he remembered the claustrophobia of being in an MRI machine. No matter what they tried to tell him, he knew this was the same thing. The room was small and sterile and dominated by the large piece of machinery he was presumably about to be stuffed into. Along one wall was a wide window, through which Dr. Murray was sitting, along side another man who seemed to be dealing with something on a monitor Bitty couldn’t see. 

March moved quickly as Bitty was asked to change into a paper hospital gown, ushering him onto the table as soon as he was finished and poking his arm with something sharp. 

“Ow!” Bitty protested, almost pulling his arm back, but she held him tight. 

“Don’t worry, we just need a little blood, and you need a little radiation, and then we can start the scan.” 

Her grin was slowly becoming Bitty’s least favorite thing about Samwell. 

Over a speaker system, Dr. Murray’s voice crackled. “None of this is going to hurt, Eric. It’ll be over with soon. We just need you to stay still in the tube, you can sleep if you want.” 

Bitty winced as March removed whatever had been poking his arm, and then quickly returned to stab something into his neck. 

“Ah, stop that!” 

She only laughed and Bitty tried to remain still. True to their word, the whole procedure of preparing him for the Tube only took a few minutes. Before Bitty knew it, the sharp pricks were gone and March was heading out the door. As it closed behind her, the lights dimmed and the machine hummed to life. 

_'Deep breaths, Eric. Just keep breathing and hold still. It’ll be over soon,'_ he reminded himself as the table began to move, pulling him closer to the buzzing contraption and into its confines. He closed his eyes as the ceiling disappeared and was replaced with the plastic tube, barely six inches from his face. 

_'Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.' ___

__Above him the machine was thumping and grinding, something ominously clicking in rapid fire very close to his face. Murray’s voice was even louder in the tube. “Hold your leg still, Eric.”_ _

__“Sorry,” he breathed out, squeezing his eyes tighter as he resisted the urge to open them._ _

__“You’re doing great, kid.”_ _

___'Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Deep breaths.'_

Bitty had no idea how much time passed, with the clicking and grinding and Murray occasionally telling him to move one arm or the other. He was focusing on trying to breathe, keeping his heart rate steady and not opening his eyes. Maybe the heart rate wasn’t going so well, but he was two for three at the moment, and feeling relatively confident. 

“Okay, Eric, just another minute here and I think we’ll have everything we need.” 

Bitty breathed out hard, the tension in his shoulders beginning to relax. All of his fears over the tests seemed to have been in vain. It had been little more than a hospital check up with a scan, and he was almost done. With any luck they wouldn’t find anything and then he could go home. 

He certainly felt like he was in the clear, until he opened his eyes. 

The top of the tube was only a few inches from his face, and wherever his eyes could move to, it was all he could see. His chest tightened and any attempts at breathing were forgotten as panic set in. 

“Easy, Eric, almost done.”

Bitty tried to repeat the phrase in his head, almost done, almost done, almost done. He wasn’t trapped, he was in the tube voluntarily. He could do this. He could stay calm. 

Without warning, the table gave out under him. 

Bitty screamed, throwing out his arms in an attempt to grab onto something to stop his fall, but to no avail. His back hit the ground, sending a shock all the way to his teeth, but that didn’t seem to be the end. He had no idea where he was or what was happening but everything was pitch dark and everything _hurt_. Not just from the fall, but he felt like he was being stabbed all over, something hard and unforgiving slamming into his arms, his legs, his chest, his head. He was screaming, thrashing and desperately trying to escape from whatever was happening, but his voice was failing. All around him he could hear sirens and shouts, something heavy banging, but they all sounded muffled, like they were miles away.

Bitty tried to scream for help, but words were beyond him as he tried desperately to fight off the attack. His hands would occasionally land on something, before it would disappear and he was fighting off nothing once more. Every shift he made resulted in more pain, more attacks and there seemed to be no escape. It didn’t feel like anything was moving, not in the traditional sense of objects moving anyway. It was like whatever was attacking him was there, and then it simply wasn’t.

Suddenly, there was a new sound amid the far off chaos, a horrific screech of metal against metal, deafening all other noises as it rose. Despite his panic, Bitty couldn’t stop himself from covering his ears as he continued to thrash, trying to save himself from this new horror. The darkness around him broke as a thin strip of light exploded to his right, followed by three more, all running parallel to one another. Suddenly the sounds from the outside world weren’t muffled at all, all the shouts and the warning siren blasting in through the tiny openings. Bitty couldn’t understand what he was looking at, only that the sound was coming from the path of the light. 

He was in something metal, trapped in a solid box as something was attacking him, and something else was ripping open the wall. Outside, someone was shouting his name.

Something solid punched through the four lines, creating a hole and Bitty realized what he had mistaken for a tool was actually a hand, curled in a fist with four wicked looking claws dripping with what might have been blood for their efforts. The fist unfurled and was reaching out to him, and despite all instincts screaming at him to retreat farther, Bitty reached out to grab the clawed hand. In the light he was able to look at his metal prison, but what he saw didn’t make any sense. 

Nothing was moving inside, his twitching and injured form was the only break in the otherwise solid structure. But everywhere he looked there were wires and tubes and thick sheets of metal – all pushing through his body. Terror overtook his voice, rendering him silent as he clung to the hand but he watched with wide eyes as he was pulled, the wires and metal all sliding through him like they were a hologram. 

Or like he was a hologram. 

Another hand joined the one he was holding onto, and Bitty watched as it tried to grab at his leg, but slid right through. It tried again and this time he felt those solid claws bite into his skin, drawing blood as he was dragged out through the jagged metal hole. 

The light was blinding and all around him there were sirens blaring and people shouting, and it took Bitty only a moment to realize it was all about him. His entire body was shaking, fingers digging in tight to the arm that was still holding onto him. Bitty’s head was resting on what he assumed was his savior’s thigh, which also seemed to be shaking almost as hard as he was. Bitty tried to blink, finding a bright light suddenly in his face as Dr. Murray was holding his eye open. 

“Eric, Eric can you hear me?” 

Bitty squinted his eyes, pulling away from the doctor’s hand as he tried to take in his surroundings. Behind the doctor stood Lardo and Shitty, both looking significantly paler than he remembered them. Lardo had her hands clamped over her mouth, her stoic expression shattered as she watched him with wide and frightened eyes. Shitty had one hand squeezing her shoulder so hard that Bitty thought he might bruise her. Even Dr. Murray looked unsettled. 

“Eric, can you hear me?” 

“Yeah,” he managed after a moment. He looked down at himself, not fully trusting himself to move much more. His gown was tearing and there were a few shallow cuts welling up on his skin. For the first time he realized the claws were still hooked over his hip. The hand was trembling lightly, though it looked like the claws were receding back into the mostly human hand. There was black liquid dripping from the tips. 

Bitty finally steadied himself, tilting his head to look up at the person still holding onto him. He meant to thank his clawed savior, but found his voice stuck in his throat as he realized whose lap he was curled up in. 

Jack breathed out a hard breath through his nose, his claws drumming along Bitty’s hip. “Welcome to the team, Bittle.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, I am available for complaints and general shouting at [**Dexondefense**](http://dexondefense.tumblr.com/)


	4. BRAWL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bitty would expect a high tech secret science facility to come up with a better term than Brawl. He would be wrong.
> 
> Warnings for mild blood and violence in this chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very special shout out to the incredible [Em](http://ssaarboretem.tumblr.com/) who edited this chapter. She is amazing and the only reason it is readable.

**_Two weeks later._ **

“Mom?” 

For a moment, there was nothing on the other side of the line except for a low hum of white noise. Bitty found himself unable to move, his fingers curled around the ancient telephone cord. He was in the middle of trying to figure out if the stain on the wall was water damage or something else, trying to distract himself from the idea that there might be no response on the other end, when he heard it. 

“ _Dicky?_ ” The connection wasn’t great, the static never fully dissolving, but he recognized his mother’s voice all the same. 

It took everything he had to keep from bursting into tears right then and there, but he knew that wouldn’t send the greatest message. Instead, he curled up on the hard plastic chair Lardo had dropped him off in and tried to hold himself together as he spoke to his mother for the first time in two weeks.

“Hi mama.” 

“ _Oh, Dicky! My baby, where are you? How are you? When are you coming home? Are you okay?_ ” She barely had one question out before she was rolling on to the next. Bitty laughed through the tears threatening to fall as he heard her babbling excitedly to someone on her end of the line. 

There was some shuffling and a new voice came through the line. “ _Son?_ ”

Bitty held the phone away from his face as he sniffled. “Hello, Coach.” 

“ _What’s going on, are you coming home?_ ” 

This was the entire reason he had called, or at least it was the most important information he had to relay. He had practiced in the mirror for two days, rehearsing exactly what he was going to say. Now that he was sitting in the quiet room, with the old phone on the wall and sitting in the uncomfortable chair with his parent’s distorted voices coming from miles away, it didn’t seem so easy. 

“Not yet,” he finally said. The silence on the other end of the line was palpable, and he bit his lip. 

“ _What?_ ” His mother’s voice was smaller than before, almost indistinguishable beneath the static. 

“They, uh, they found something.” On the other end of the line both of his parents began speaking, but he plowed on as if he hadn’t heard. “It’s not…safe for me to be home yet. So I have to stay here for a few more weeks.”

“ _Weeks?_ ” His mother was crying now, he could hear the thickness in her voice and blinked hard to stop himself from doing the same.

“Yeah.” His voice was wavering, giving him away. “But, uh, it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

Bitty counted to 15 in his head before his father’s voice came back, a steeliness to it that told Bitty he was trying to hold himself together. “ _Are you…are you okay?_ ” The question wavered at the end, like he knew it was a stupid thing to ask. 

That, more than anything else, was what finally helped ease the pressure behind Bitty’s eyes. “Yeah. I’m okay. Honestly. I, uh, I have some roommates. It’s kind of like college, they even say I can sign up for classes. I don’t know what they’re gonna tell MU, but they said all the credits will transfer. It’s something to do at least.” 

“ _Yeah?_ ” His mother asked, obviously also trying to pull herself together. “ _Are your roommates nice?_ ” 

“Yeah, mom, they’re all really great guys! They’re helping me get situated here and…they’re just great guys.” His hands were shaking, almost as bad as they had been that first day, right after the lights had settled and the world had stopped spinning and his mother was holding him still. She wasn’t here to hold him now though, and he was going to have to figure out how to stop shaking on his own. 

**_X_ _X_ _X_**

Bitty took an hour to talk to his parents before he decided he could handle another few weeks without speaking to them. He hoped it wouldn’t be that long, but Lardo had told him it wasn’t always certain when they were able to have recreational outside contact. Something about satellites and how much energy needed to be diverted to other things. It had all sounded a little made up, but Bitty liked Lardo and didn’t really feel like pressing that point so soon after she had done him this favor. 

As he hung up the phone, his parent’s assurances of love and good wishes still ringing in his ears, Bitty couldn’t bring himself to move himself from his uncomfortable chair for another few minutes. 

“How did it go?” Lardo asked before Bitty had even left the room, before he could even see her as he turned the corner. He had grown accustomed to her paint stained jeans and beat up old sandals, and it was strange seeing her back in her pressed black suit, those impenetrable shades resting firmly on her nose. She was a government agent, he tried to remind himself, and she had drugged him within hours of meeting him, but even that memory couldn’t bring up any sense of fear. Not after he’d watched her cursing her way through a botched attempt to paint her nails at 4 AM on the kitchen floor.

He sighed. “It was okay,” he told her, not trusting his voice for much more. “I miss them.” 

She nodded, and he fell into step alongside her as they walked. The halls of Samwell hadn’t changed, and he still felt disoriented as he walked through them, but he was beginning to get used to it. The bleak grey of the walls and the flickering lights weren’t comforting exactly, but they didn’t make him want to throw up anymore. He considered that progress. 

“I get that,” Lardo assured him, one hand resting gently on his arm as they stepped around three men in HAZMAT suits debating about how to clean up a green slime that appeared to be eating through a wall. 

“Where are your parents?” Bitty asked, before he could consider the pros and cons of that question. 

As he readied himself to shove his foot in his mouth, Lardo shrugged, a small smile catching her lips. “They’re topside.” She tilted her head and Bitty thought she might have been looking at him behind those frames. “They think I joined the FBI. They’re proud, but worried.” 

Bitty nodded. “So…how did you end up down here? Like, I feel like you don’t just send in a resume to work in a top secret government facility.”

She laughed, a high-pitched and easy giggle that didn’t match up with her no-nonsense suit. “Yeah, not quite.” She shoved at his shoulder, steering them down a different hallway. Bitty shoved her hand away good-naturedly; he was starting to recognize the way. 

“I, uh, well I was enrolled in college, and things were going…okay I guess. Didn’t really know what I was going to do with a degree.” She turned and gave him a sheepish sort of wince. “I wanted to be an artist,” she whispered it, like it was a secret or something embarrassing. Bitty wanted to disagree with the insult she hadn’t vocalized, but thought maybe it wasn’t the right time. 

Lardo took a deep breath, her shoulders looking a little more square before she continued. “I was in the studio one night, real late, and there was this light. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from, it just blasted in from all the windows all at once, and there was this sound….And then there was this girl, she had pink skin and too many eyes, and it was hard to look at her, and she was hurt. But, something was coming. So I took her gun and…” her voice had taken on a breathless sort of quality Bitty had never heard from her before. He didn’t have to see her eyes to know she wasn’t focusing on the present. For a moment, she didn’t sound like Agent Duan, or even the Lardo he knew from hanging out with his roommates. Not for the first time, he wondered what her real first name was, and thought that maybe he was hearing what was left of that girl. The art student who hadn’t known aliens existed and had been just as scared as he was. He also wondered how, after everything she had been through and witnessed, she could still be so awestruck by her first encounter. 

You never forget your first, Bitty supposed.

He also supposed that saying hadn’t been referring about your first extra-terrestrial encounter, but what did he know. 

“Anyway.” She shook her head, like she was trying to break herself free of the memory. Her hands were shaking. “She was unconscious. I looked after this alien girl for three days before the government showed up. I kind of panicked at first. I thought they were going to experiment on her, but she was one of theirs and they had lost her.” Lardo was talking quickly, hardly stopping for a breath between sentences and Bitty wondered how long it had been since anyone had asked for the story. When she finally paused she blew out a long breath, her hands settling back by her sides, straight and still. “Hall was the one who came to collect her. He offered me a job that day and I’ve been here ever since.” 

“Wow,” Bitty exhaled. He hadn’t even realized he’d been holding his breath through her story, and was now feeling a little light headed as they descended a set of stairs. “That’s amazing. You’re so brave.”

She huffed out a laugh, shaking her head. “Nah, I just really didn’t want to die. There’s a difference.”

“I just kind of, curled up on the floor and screamed during my first encounter.” 

“That’s usually how it goes.” 

Bitty let out a shuddering breath, trying to stop his own hands from shaking now too. If Lardo could face down an alien with a gun and no prior knowledge on her first encounter, he could handle today. Maybe. It was a nice thought regardless. 

“Are you ready for today?” Lardo asked. 

“Absolutely not,” Bitty assured her, his tone light. “But, I don’t want to be trapped down here forever, so I guess I had better do something about that.” 

“You’ll be fine,” she told him, her voice as close to comforting as Bitty was sure she ever approached. “Jack is mostly bark with only minimal bite.” 

Jack’s looming presence had begun to recede in terms of how horrifying it was to deal with him. It was now more of an uncomfortable pressure in the back of his head as long as he didn’t get too close, but it didn’t make Jack’s standoffishness any easier to handle. There was also the fact that he had defaced thousands of dollars of government property to save Bitty, but Jack didn’t seem keen on bringing that back up, so Bitty decided not to push it. “Right.” 

“I mean it, Bits. He needs you on this team as much as you need to be on it, don’t forget that.”

Bitty nodded, though he didn’t feel much better. “Right. Seven on a team. I make five.”

“And Nursey is six.” 

Bitty still had yet to meet the mysterious Nursey, who was only occasionally referred to in passing. So far he had gathered that Nursey, unlike the rest of them, was allowed to leave the base from time to time, had a human mother in Manhattan, and was responsible for 80% of the damage done to the Haus. 

“And you have seven lined up? Who is it? Like, are they in the base yet? And why isn’t Johnson on the team? Like, I know he’s…around, or something, so why can’t he join?”

Lardo tilted her head, considering the questions a moment, and was just opening her mouth when Ransom crashed through a door to their immediate right that Bitty hadn’t realized existed. 

“THERE YOU ARE!” 

Bitty grabbed Lardo’s shoulder to keep himself standing as the shock of the unexpected entrance hit him. Lardo hadn’t flinched. 

“Here we are,” Bitty agreed, releasing both his grip on Lardo’s shoulder and his chest. 

It wasn’t the first time Bitty had seen Ransom in his team uniform, but it was the first time he had known he was about to follow suit. The outfit Ransom had been suited with was skin tight and looked almost like a wetsuit, all white with a streak of red running up his arms and over his shoulders. Above his heart was a silver number 11. It looked like he was about to compete in the most extreme form of water polo ever created. 

“Come on man, you need to get suited up.” 

The words weighed heavier on Bitty than he would have liked to admit. He had spent the last two weeks working out with the other boys. Despite his size, Bitty had never been out of shape. Years of figure skating and his brief – and traumatic– foray into football had shaped him into an athlete, and the weight lifting and running hadn’t been too bad. Today was the day though; today was combat training. 

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” He asked before he could consider how weak it made him sound. 

He was able to give Lardo one last wave before Ransom was dragging him away. “Yeah, it’ll be great.” 

“Sink or swim,” another Ransom told him from the other side. As many times as Ransom spontaneously duplicated himself, Bitty wasn’t sure he would ever get used to it. 

“What if I sink?” Two more doorways found them in what Bitty would have called a locker room in another life. There were certainly lockers and he thought he saw a set of showers up around the corner, but there was an undercurrent of electricity crackling overhead, and some lockers had so many padlocks and fingerprint scanners on them that Bitty thought he might be in the armory. 

It was almost as soon as he had that thought that one Ransom finished typing in a complicated code into a nearby scanner. The lid popped open to reveal what was most definitely a gun. Not the kind of gun Bitty’s father kept in a locked case, nor the kind that hung on a police officer’s belt, but the kind that only existed as a prop in a science fiction movie. 

Bitty had to remind himself that his entire life was a science fiction movie now, and he shouldn’t have been so surprised. 

“Are you going to shoot someone?” Bitty asked, his voice catching at the end. 

The currently unarmed Ransom laughed, as the one holding the gun turned it over, eyes narrowed as he scrutinized something Bitty would probably never understand.  
“Nothing alive.” 

“PROBLEM.” 

Bitty was glad both Ransoms were just as startled by Holster’s sudden shout, as well as his violent entrance as he kicked in the door. 

“ _Jesus_ man.”

“Jesus isn’t going to help us,” Holster assured them, shaking his head. His own uniform matched Ransom’s almost perfectly, except there was a silver 4 as opposed to Ransom’s 11. It matched the hard chrome of his jaw. 

“What’s going on?” Ransom asked.

Behind Holster the door slammed open again, this time revealing Shitty, looking equally as put out in his equally tight wetsuit. Apparently kicking in the door was the only way to open it. “They’re putting us in a brawl.”

“ _What?_ ” 

Bitty wasn’t completely sure what that meant, but he felt his blood run cold. Bitty had been in fights before, but none of them had been his choice, and none of them had ended well for him. “I can’t fight!” No one seemed to notice he had even spoken. 

When the door swung open a third time, finally pushed and not kicked, no one jumped but Bitty felt Jack’s presence like a rock on his chest. 

“We’re signed up for the next round of Team Comp,” he explained. Bitty wondered if he had just been waiting outside the door, deciding when the right time to barge in and make his announcement was. He was the only one other than Bitty who wasn’t in the tight fitting uniform. 

“How can we be signed up?” Shitty pushed, his mustache twitching as he frowned. “We have five people.” 

Jack was shaking his head before Shitty had finished speaking. “Real Team Comp starts in a week, we have to enter the preliminary or we can’t try for another ten months.” 

“Ten months?” For the first time since the confusion had begun, everyone seemed to remember Bitty was in the room. 

“They don’t allow teams to try out year round,” Ransom explained, a deep frown that was breaking Bitty’s heart marring his features. “Comp, uh, the competition to see who’s the best suited to go Topside, takes weeks.”

“So-” Other Ransom continued, placing a gentle hand on Bitty’s shoulder “-if we don’t enter now, we can’t try again for another ten months.”

Ten months. Bitty could be trapped down here for another ten months. With a horrible jolt he realized suddenly that ten months might be when the winning team got to leave. Ten months might be the best he was going to get; failure would mean longer. 

He felt like he couldn’t breathe, a horrible pressure tightening in his throat and pressing against the back of his face. He felt like he was drowning, but he tried to stay above water. When he tried to speak nothing came out, so he settled on just nodding instead. 

“But there’s only five of us,” Holster pointed out, sounding exasperated with the whole ordeal. When he sighed, it sounded like valve turned too far. “We have to wait until we have seven.” Bitty wondered again how long Holster had been at Samwell. 

“According to the official register, we do have seven.” Jack didn’t sound happy about that development, and he kept his arms crossed tight across his chest. 

Holster and the Ransoms echoed a chorus of questions, but Shitty put an end to it with a flourish of a piece of paper, shaking it front of Holster’s face. “Take a fucking gander.” 

Bitty leaned in to read at Holster’s elbow, barely beating one Ransom to it. Why both Ransoms had to look was beyond him. 

**TEAM 151SMH** \- Sponsored by Agent Duan.  
1\. Adam Birkholtz  
2\. Jack Zimmermann  
3\. **[REDACTED]** Knight  
4\. Justin Oluransi  
5\. Derek Nurse  
6\. William Poindexter  
7\. Eric Bittle

Instead of answering any sort of questions, it raised at least ten more for Bitty. Why was Shitty’s name redacted? When had Derek – presumably the infamous Nursey – agreed to join their team? Why did he not learn Ransom and Holster’s first names until now? Why did it not occur to him that they _had_ first names? And who-

“Who the fuck is William Poindexter?” 

“And why is his name ahead of Bitty’s if we haven’t met him?” 

“Wait, what does that have to do with anything?” 

Shitty shifted, snatching the paper back from Holster with a quickness Bitty wouldn’t have assumed him capable of. “The list is always in order of who arrived here first. If Ol’ Billy is ahead of you-“

“Then he got here before you did and for some reason, Lardo hasn’t introduced us yet,” Jack finished, a hard set to his jaw that made Bitty nervous. 

“And she probably signed up Nursey without asking too.” 

The pressure in his chest was only worsening, creeping out to his limbs. Almost a quarter of their team was fake, written down on the assumption that they would join without any clarification. Bitty wanted to be mad at Lardo, but he knew he couldn’t be. None of this was her fault. In fact, without her fib on the information sheet, it looked like they wouldn’t even be able to compete for another ten months. 

It was not a fact that was lost on the senior members of the team. 

“Okay,” Bitty began slowly, trying to make sense of everything being thrown at him. “But…two of our team members aren’t here, how can we compete with just five?”

“It’s preliminary,” Shitty told him. “They can have excuses for missing these, as long as they’re here for the real deal next month.”

“But in the meantime, we have to go out there.” Somehow Jack had gotten the paper and was folding it neatly in threes. “The five of us go out there and fight, or we’re disqualified.” 

It was then, finally, that all eyes fell on Bitty. He tried not to focus on it. All four of them were so much bigger than him. Like, unreasonably so much larger than his tiny frame, and they had all been doing this much longer. They were trained in this. Bitty, well, Bitty kind of got scooped up by an alien craft and didn’t have a better option at the moment. After a pause, Jack turned away, expression guarded. 

“You don’t have to do this, Bits.” Holster’s flesh and blood, or at least artificially flesh and possibly oil, hand came down on Bitty’s shoulder. Regardless of what it was made out of, it was solid and warm, and something about it jolted Bitty back to the present. 

He did this, or he was trapped down here. He did this, or he was trapping them down here.

“No,” he told them, head held high and hiding any sort of trembling in a nod. “No, I can do this. Let’s do it.” 

Jack’s head snapped back, eyes laser focused on him. “Really?” 

“Are you sure that’s a good idea,” A Ransom took a step closer to Bitty, but he was watching Jack. “He’s had zero combat training. He could get hurt out there.” 

“He’ll be fine,” Jack insisted, suddenly full of confidence before Bitty could reconsider his options. “All of you head out, Bittle and I will meet you out there.”

Bittle, not Bitty, he hadn’t failed to notice. 

That seemed to be the end of the discussion, Ransom casting him one, or two depending on how you were counting, last looks before following Holster and Shitty out the double doors. Jack was opening a locker and tapping another, not even looking at Bitty. “This one is yours,” he informed him before reaching behind his back and pulling his shirt off in one smooth motion. 

Bitty fell in next to him, opening up his newly designated locker. Inside there was a red and white suit hanging on a hook. He pulled at the chest to reveal a silver 15 emblazoned on the front. Beside him, Jack was stripping down and Bitty did his best to focus on his own locker. When Jack turned to the side, Bitty snuck a glance. 

He wasn’t looking for the usual reason the football team had always been concerned about; instead he was looking for something out of the ordinary. Ransom could duplicate himself and Holster was half machine and Shitty was covered in scars, but Jack was something else entirely. His hands could turn into wicked claws in an instant, and he could speak in a language that sounded like rocks shifting and Bitty couldn’t forget the heavy pressure in his chest whenever he was around. He wasn’t human, or at least not fully, and so far no one seemed interested in telling him anything more than that. 

Jack’s naked torso looked no different than any other humans’ to Bitty. Well, most humans didn’t have shoulders that broad or that unfair a cut of abs, but that didn’t seem necessarily paranormal in any sense. Jack straightened up and Bitty tried to pull his shirt off the same way he had, only to find himself immediately caught in it. 

“Bit-“ Jack cut himself off, presumably after catching sight of his smaller teammate struggle to even get out of his clothes. “Bittle,” he began again after Bitty freed himself with a gasp. “Thank you, for doing this.” 

When Bitty looked up at him, Jack promptly looked away. 

“We’ve needed a team for a while.” He seemed uncomfortable with speaking so much, a hard frown crossing his face as he stepped into his suit. “We still might not have one, but,” he paused, turning his back to Bitty as he pulled his arms through the sleeves. He really did have a nice back, Bitty thought absently as he was suddenly presented with the expanse of it. “It’s nice to have a shot,” Jack concluded, turning back around. 

Bitty had managed to fit into his own, only mildly unsettled by how perfectly it fit, and mustered a small strained smile. Jack towered over him, and his heart was still hammering in his chest just from being in such close proximity to him, but he decided privately in that moment that maybe Jack wasn’t so bad. For a moment, anyway. 

There was a silver number one over Jack’s heart, and Bitty found he hadn’t expected anything else. 

“Are you ready?”

“Let’s do it,” Bitty told him, raising his hands into fists. Jack didn’t smile, but he thought he saw a twitch in the corner of his mouth. 

“You’re one of us now,” Jack told him, the echo of his locker closing bouncing off the walls. “You don’t have any combat training, but you have-“

“A superpower,” Bitty concluded. “I have a superpower,” he told Jack, straightening his shoulders and holding his head high. He was scared of Jack, even as much as he trusted him, but he had to hold his own at some point. 

Bitty did not have a superpower because, apparently, superpowers didn’t exist according to every single boring person in Samwell. Jack had a ‘genetic advantage’ and Shitty had ‘biological engineering’ and Ransom had a ‘mutation’ and Bitty had-

“You have a side effect of being taken apart molecule by molecule and then being put back together,” Jack informed him evenly. 

“It’s a superpower,” Bitty insisted again. “I can phase through matter, that’s a superpower.”

Jack raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything. “Right, well. You’re going to have to learn to get it under control if you want to call it that. But for now, try to keep it up as much as possible. If you can’t be touched, then the rest of us can worry about taking out the rest of their team. You’re just here to fill out the roster.” 

Bitty frowned, but if Jack noticed he didn’t say anything. 

“I…it seems like I can usually bring it out when I’m scared,” he confessed as he followed Jack through the doors and out into a long hallway. The further they went, the heavier the activity around them began to buzz, with people running back and forth with strange looking equipment and important looking papers. 

“That’s good,” Jack told him over his shoulder as he pushed through another set of steel doors and into an open arena. “Just be scared.” Bitty blinked against the bright lights and let his vision adjust. It looked like a stadium, the two of them standing along the edge of a steel floored oval, with high and heavy looking walls. Far above there was a long strip of glass, and Bitty thought it might have been an observation wall, it certainly looked like there were some figures moving around behind the glass. 

Holster, Shitty and three Ransom’s were standing in the middle of the arena, and a dozen feet away was another group of guys, all dressed in black and blue suits. Someone else was moving between them, a clipboard clutched in her scaly green hands. 

“FARMER!” Bitty shouted before he could stop himself, immediately going red as the shout echoed off the metal walls. 

All eyes in the arena turned to Bitty, and even from so far away Bitty saw Farmer’s blinding white smile as she waved. “HI ERIC!” She called back, unbothered by the way her own call echoed back. 

Bitty tried to control his blush as everyone watched him approach, trying to keep his focus on Farmer. He was unprepared when she launched at him, engulfing him in a tight hug. “How have you been?” She asked as they pulled apart, like they were old friends and hadn’t met only once. He found himself much less affected by the roughness of her skin than he had been the first time he met her, or maybe the suit was just protecting him. 

“Uh, all right,” he told her, feeling more at ease just by being near her. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed her green face. “I joined a team.”

“Yeah, I saw!” She beamed, and Bitty thought she might have had more than one row of teeth in her mouth. Suddenly her smile faltered. “Sorry about your test results. But that’s great about you finding a team so fast, I don’t really, uh, know any of your teammates but they seem nice!”

“Yeah, they’re great, they-“

“All right, enough flirting, are we gonna do this or what?” One of the boys on the other team barked. Bitty decided he didn’t like him very much. 

“Are you ready for this?” Farmer asked, her scales shifting in a way that looked almost painful as she frowned. “How much training have you had?”

“Enough,” Bitty lied as he began mimicking the stretches Ransom was currently doing and hoping it made him look more ready. Her expression told him he wasn’t very convincing. 

Neither had long to dwell on it though, as a whistle was blowing and Shitty was calling Bitty back to the team. 

“Oh shit look at Bitty,” Holster stage whispered as he walked by. 

“Getting all the girls.”

“Or at the very least one girl.”

Shitty was beaming at him, a knowing tilt to his smile that Bitty didn’t understand. “You could have told us sooner that you wanted to see her, ya know.” 

It took Bitty a moment to catch up and understand what was happening, even as the teams separated and lights began flashing as the doors closed behind Farmer. He was about to enter into a fight, an honest to God brawl with people of unknown powers, where he was going to try to use his own powers, and he was being teased for his nonexistent crush on a lizard girl. 

Somehow, among all that was surreal that was happening, the most bizarre thing that occurred to Bitty in that moment was that his new team had no idea he was gay. He tried to say something; not to come out in this arena and not even to dispel their thoughts, but to say anything at all, but the words got caught and Ransom laughed. 

“You’re gonna kick these dumbasses’ butts and she’s gonna be so impressed.”

“We’ll give you a talk on the birds and the lizards later.” 

“Yeah, for now we gotta put these fuckers down,” Shitty agreed, cracking his knuckles. 

“Focus up,” Jack snapped, shooting a glare at all of them over his shoulder. 

Bitty tried to take his advice, shaking out his shoulders and planting his feet. He had been nervous going into this, had known it wouldn’t be easy, but as he stood there in the metal dome with anonymous faces watching from above and giants surrounding him in skin tight jumpsuits, it finally occurred to him. 

He couldn’t do this. 

“Oh, God.” 

“ _ **BEGIN.**_ ”

The starting siren was an explosion of noise and a flash of red light and then the floor beneath him was shaking. Bitty almost fell to the ground, but one Ransom grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him up just before he could hit the ground. Before Bitty could thank him Ransom was gone, pulling one guy, who suddenly had at least three more limbs and a tongue that seemed to be acting as a fourth, off of Holster. 

Bitty watched with wide eyes as Holster delivered a punch to his opponent’s chest hard enough to send him flying at least ten feet back. His body hit the wall with a horrific boom and fell to the ground. He didn’t move. 

Bitty’s attention was so fixed on the unmoving body of Holster’s fallen opponent and the unexpected shifting of the ground beneath his feet that he didn’t notice the man coming at him until an arm was suddenly through his chest. 

Bitty gasped, staring down at the fist currently sticking straight out through the 11 on his shirt. 

“What the fuck?” Came from behind him, before Bitty had the sense to run. He bolted away from his attacker, and screamed as a piece of wall suddenly shot out in front of him. He didn’t have time to stop, couldn’t slow himself down but he passed right through it, didn’t even feel the movement through him as if it had been made of nothing more than light. 

All around him the dome had fallen into chaos, screams and cries of pain overlapping with the rumble of moving walls and shifting floors. There was a screech that sounded more like a bird than a human, and a sudden mechanical whir like a saw turning on, and Bitty didn’t feel much like trying to figure out where either sound was coming from. So instead he ran, ducking where he could and phasing through what he wasn’t quick enough to evade. 

He watched as Shitty took a hit that should have sent him flying, but he seemed to almost absorb the blow, and then twisted in a way that didn’t seem physically possible to deliver a swift kick to his attackers’ head. 

Bitty would have sworn, had he been able to find the breath to do so. Panic was sending his heart into overdrive, slamming against his chest as he bolted as quickly as he could from one side of the arena to the other. He might have possibly felt bad for his lack of aid to his teammates, might have been embarrassed by what was basically just a set of frantic laps as things happened around him, but in the heat of the moment, neither thought occurred to him. 

“Christ,” he managed to huff out as something – or maybe someone, he wasn’t exactly certain – slammed into the metal wall at least fifty feet above his head. The resulting boom shook the floor even more, the soft waves giving way to a full storm of quakes that sent Bitty flying to the ground and sliding across the metal floor. 

Someone reached out, trying to stop his journey, but the hand slid right through him, as did the two walls extending out of the floor. 

The third did not. 

Bitty gasped as he slammed into the hard metal, the impact shooting up through his back. He didn’t have time to linger on the pain, as suddenly a fist was slamming down on his face. If he had any wind left in his lungs it was gone as a hard fist connected with his nose. Bitty threw his hands up instinctively, turning his face into the metal to try to protect himself, bracing for an impact that didn’t come again. Eyes squeezed shut, he heard his assailant’s grunts as he tried to make contact again, and the floor beneath Bitty rumbled with the weight of the hits, but none landed again. 

Terror seized him as he felt his blood trickling down his face. Was it passing through the ground, or was it pooling underneath him? Did his attacker have blood on his hands or had that phased through as well? He heard the hits landing, heard the cursing of the man above him – _what the fuck are you?_ – and tried not to black out, when suddenly the rumbling around him came to an abrupt stop, halted by a blaring siren that had him almost dropping his stance to cover his ears. 

“ ** _END SESSION._** ” That same booming yet somehow evenly monotone female voice announced and Bitty tried to uncurl himself as best he could. 

“You did it man!” Shitty was suddenly all he could see, his mustache so close Bitty felt it brush his face. “We qualify man! We qualify for the competition!” He pulled back, seemingly unconcerned with Bitty’s bleeding face and current fetal position, and cupped his hands over his mouth like a megaphone. “WE FUCKING QUALIFY BITCHES!” 

“ _ **Mr. Knight, please refrain from cursing in the arena,**_ ” another even monotone voice, this time male, rang out through the dome. 

“FUCKING MAKE ME.” 

Bitty felt like his limbs wouldn’t move, couldn’t quite figure out how to move his arms or legs from their tightly curled position. 

“Yo, you alright?” Shitty asked, but did not move back into Bitty’s line of sight. 

Bitty couldn’t find his words, didn’t know how to move his tongue, so he just nodded slightly. 

“Don’t worry, the blood will come right out,” Holster’s voice assured him from somewhere to the left. “And it’s just a popped blood vessel, nothing broken.” How Holster knew that, Bitty didn’t want to know.

“Okay,” he managed. 

“All right,” Jack announced, a hard slapping noise that might have been him clapping his hands together accompanying his voice. “That wasn’t bad. It wasn’t great, but we were outmanned and it’s been a little while since we’ve been up against a real team, so we have to take that into consideration. But I think we might really have a chance here.”

“Fuck yeah we do!” Ransom whooped. “That was basically four against seven, and we didn’t fuck up too badly.”

“ _Too_ badly.”

“Shut up.” 

“And we’re gonna get Bitty some training, and he’s gonna be a killer. I can see it in his eyes.”

“Where is Bittle?” Jack asked. 

It took all of Bitty’s will power to raise his hand. “Down here.”

“What…are you doing down there?” 

“Recuperating.” 

“We could make a strategy out of this,” Holster told them all sagely. “You should have seen the way that asshole was trying to punch him, just going straight through and beating himself up on the floor. Like a _dumbass_.” 

“It was awesome.” 

“Was it?” Bitty snapped, or tried to snap. In reality, it came out of more of a feeble warble, sounding more self-conscious than chiding and he had no one to blame but himself when Holster stooped down, resting one gigantic hand on his shoulder. There was a puddle of blood wetting his cheek, but none of his teammates seemed to think that was an issue that needed immediate attention. 

“Yeah man, it was fuckin’ killer.” 

“With you on our team, we are getting the fuck out of here!” Shitty shouted, his curse echoing off of the high metal walls. Above them the speaker system crackled, like someone was annoyed by the display, but didn’t feel like putting effort into chiding him again. 

Holster’s hands were surprisingly gentle under Bitty’s arms as he helped pull him to his feet. Bitty tilted his head back as he straightened up to try to stop the flow of blood. Before he closed his eyes against the pain, he caught sight of his elated team and thought, half deliriously, that Jack looked rather handsome when he smiled. 

“Alright, alright,” Jack laughed, pushing a Ransom off of him. He was trying and failing to school his features into something more serious. “Nothing is certain yet. We qualified, but all on technicalities. We still don’t have Nursey, or Poindexter. If either of them says no, it’s over.” His voice had lowered by the end of his statement, the gravity of the situation diluting the mood. 

“Even if one of them says no, there’s always the next round,” Shitty reminded them all. 

“In ten months,” Bitty added. 

“Ten months isn’t so long.” Holster shrugged, tightening his arm around Bitty’s shoulders. “It’s ten months to train.”

‘Ten months to find someone better than a guy who already has a pass and a wildcard.” 

“You are all the most negative people and it’s bringing me down.” Shitty threw his arm around Bitty’s other side, sandwiching him between the two. “Today was a good day, alright? It was a victory, you’re all beautiful fuckers, and I am starving. Dinner’s on me boys!”

“Is it really?”

“Absolutely not.” 

Bitty had trouble sorting through his emotions as they made their way back to the locker room, Holster and two Ransom’s shouting across at each other and Shitty hopping along and interjecting where he could. Even Jack laughed a few times, the sound unnatural and deep. Their excitement was contagious, and Bitty found himself smiling around the blood on his face, and even found the energy to tease Ransom when he dropped the first aid kit trying to attend to him. 

When Lardo bounded into the locker room, ignoring Holster’s protests that he wasn’t decent, and nearly tackling Shitty to the floor, Bitty felt something warm in his chest, something too familiar for a group he had known less than a month. It was frustrating, but not surprising, when Lardo refused to answer questions about Poindexter ( _“I’ll tell you when you need to know, just trust me.”_ ) but no one seemed to be in the mood to challenge her in the face of their qualifying victory. 

Dinner was loud and messy and Bitty lost track of how many beers he had. At one point he was certain Jack had laughed at a joke he had made, and Farmer had appeared at some point to tell him how excited she was to see them make it. Lardo and Shitty had disappeared , March and her unwavering smile had been there to chat animatedly between two Ransoms, and Holster had tried to bribe Bitty with baking supplies to lie down on the green couch. 

It wasn’t until hours later, lying in his silent room, which may or may not have contained an unknown entity named Johnson, that Bitty considered his future at Samwell. His nose still ached and he could still taste the phantom copper of his own blood in his mouth, could hear the sirens echoing in the silence and hear the shouts of his teammates. 

If he wanted to get out of Samwell, the only way out was to fight again. And again. And again and again, until there was no one left to fight. If it came to that, he would then be signing on for a career as a professional fighter, for an indeterminate length of time. If they lost, he was stuck here. Unless he figured out a way to get a pass on his own, but then he would be abandoning his new friends, and he doubted he would ever be allowed to find out what would happen to them. So he was going to have to swallow his fear, and most likely a lot more of his own blood, before this would be over. 

Bitty sighed into the night, and in the quiet and privacy of his own room, he whispered passionately into the still air. 

_“Fuck.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who is continuing to read this ridiculous story, you're all beautiful. 
> 
> Talk to me on [tumblr](http://dexondefense.tumblr.com/).


	5. Gone Swimming

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being on a team means slightly more than regulated brawls. Bitty never did like swimming much, but maybe he does like Jack.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone, thank you for all of you who are still reading after such a huge break. A huge thank you as well to [Em](http://ssaarboretem.tumblr.com) who edited this chapter for me.
> 
> **Warnings:** This chapter contains blood and violence. For more info please see the end of chapter notes.

Despite the frequency of horrifying awakenings Bitty had experienced at Samwell, it did not make them any easier to handle. 

“BRO WAKE THE FUCK UP WE GOTTA GO!” Shitty scream was not muffled at all by the door, and Bitty was sure it had to be a super power. The shout was accompanied by a pounding that shook the door frame and the glass of water Bitty had placed on his bedside table.

Caught halfway between annoyance and fear; as he had been since he got to Samwell, he threw himself out of bed and scrambled to the door.

“What on Earth is going on?”

The jean cut offs Shitty had chosen to wear were surprisingly modest. It was a fact that had Bitty more on edge than his incessant screaming. The angry scars on Shitty’s arms seemed to stand out more as he threw his limbs around in his excitement. “DUDE GET DRESSED!” 

Bitty gripped at the door to stay standing as the shout nearly threw him back. “WHAT IS GOING ON?” He shouted back. 

“Nursey’s back!” Shitty told him, slapping the door for good measure before darting back down the hall.

“NURSEY!” A voice that sounded like Ransom shouted from somewhere down the stairs.

Bitty blinked at the empty space Shitty had just vacated before closing the door. 

“One day,” Bitty vowed as he tore through his clothing drawer for a pair of pants, “I am going to be able to get ready at a reasonable pace in this godforsaken place.” He pulled a shirt over his head and made sure Senior Bun was sitting upright on the covers. “Maybe.” 

**_X_ _X_ _X_**

Nursey was not, as Bitty had been led to believe, actually in the Haus. 

“Nursey’s dumb as shit,” Holster had explained as he scrutinized his face in the bathroom mirror. Bitty hadn’t been completely sure what Holster was doing, but when Holster shifted a piece of his skin to better cover the metal on his cheek, Bitty decided not to ask and politely looked away. “He’s always getting himself into shit topside, so he always has to spend at least a night in D-con.”

“At least,” Ransom had interjected from behind Bitty. “Yo, remember that time he ended up covered in radioactive slime and had to spend a month in there?”

“I still don’t understand how the fuck he did that.”

“He said, and I quote ‘brah, chill.’”

“Moron.” 

And that was all the information Bitty had received on the mysterious Nursey before he was shoved into an elevator, trapped between Jack and Holster in the cramped space, and headed towards D-Con. 

The elevator slowed to a stop, and that same female monotone voice announced their arrival, but she was cut off by Shitty’s dramatic gasp as he stumbled out of the lift. Unlike the rest of the base Bitty had explored, the doors did not open into a hallway. Instead, they were in a wide room, with metal walls shiny enough that a shadow of a reflection was visible in the surface. On the far wall, high and imposing, giant chrome letters were embedded in the wall, punctuated by two bright red lights on either side. 

DECONTAMINATION CHAMBERS.

Below the foreboding sign there was a bored looking girl, sitting behind a small desk and flipping through a magazine. She didn’t even glance up as Shitty talked to her, giving them a number and gesturing vaguely behind her. 

A panel in the wall slid open, and the group filtered through. Above them a red light flashed with each body that passed underneath it.

Decontamination was even more intimidating than Bitty had anticipated. It looked darker than the rest of the base, and he wondered if somewhere in the wide winding halls was the room he had first woken up in. Or maybe this was where they had taken his blood. Each footstep echoed off the high metal walls, and Bitty wasn’t sure if every other light was out on purpose or if there was just really poor electrical wiring in this part of the base. 

He didn’t have long to consider his theories, before Holster was throwing himself suddenly into an open room with a shout. He was followed quickly by Ransom and Shitty, who almost slammed Bitty against the wall in their excitement. 

A cry of “FUCKING NURSEY!” was further amplified with three sets of hands slamming against a wall. 

It was a glass wall, Bitty confirmed as he followed after them, or at least it looked like a glass wall. It separated one half of the room from the other, no sign of a door or opening even being possible through the solid structure. There were a few chairs on their side of the glass, and a few more, along with a cot and a dresser, on the other side. Most notably though, was the young man currently crumpled on the floor.

“Shit man,” he hissed, clutching his chest as he tried to sit back up. “I fucking threw my book.”

“Because you’re a fucking nerd.” 

“No, because you scared the shit out of me, man.”

“That’s what you get for being in D-CON!” 

A chorus of ‘ohhhs’ followed the statement, which Bitty thought was fully over hyping it. 

Nursey, or so Bitty assumed he was, spun so he was sitting cross-legged on the floor, looking up at his visitors from the other side of the glass. He leaned back on his hands and shot them all a lopsided grin. He was incredibly handsome, but Bitty had come to expect that from his teammates. His dark skin was lined with black and green markings, swirling designs that were soft and deliberate. They circled around his biceps in complicated patterns, wove up over his shoulders and neck, and disappeared beneath the fabric of his tank top. 

His eyes were a blazing and unnatural green, like an emerald held up the light, shifting through different shades as rapidly as he could blink. When they landed on Bitty, his eyebrows arched. “Yo, you must be Bitty.” His smile was wide and lazy. A bit belatedly, Bitty realized he had flowers in his hair, small little colorful blossoms woven between the dark strands. He was also wearing a thin necklace with the same flora, and a matching armband high on his bicep. 

“And you must be Nursey.” Bitty took a step forward, like they were going to shake hands, before remembering the glass. 

Nursey’s smile quirked at the edge and he tilted his head. “Nice to meet you man, so you’re on our team then?”

“So you’re on the team then?” Holster countered.

Nursey frowned, his bottom lip drawn out in a pout. “Why the hell I wouldn’t I be, man?”

“I fucking told you!” 

“Yeah, Lardo came ‘round earlier today and filled me in. If you can get that Poindexter dude to join, I think we’ve got a shot.”

“We still don’t know shit about him.”

“Dude, why are you still on the floor?”

Nursey shrugged, a casual roll of his shoulders that looked more like an excuse to flex than anything. “I’m comfortable down here, bro.”

Ransom grinned, leaning against the glass. “You hurt yourself when you fell, didn’t you?”

“Yep.” 

“It’s good to see you again Nursey.” Jack, who hadn’t moved from behind Bitty, offered what may have been a wave or may have just been a twitch. “If you’re going to join the team, and if we are gonna make a serious effort this year-“ 

Whatever inspirational speech Jack had been attempting to make was effectively cut off by a sudden piercing scream that filled the room. A second later, the florecenst lights cut to half power, and a red safety light started flashing above the door. Samwell was very fond of red lights, Bitty decided.

It took him a panicked moment to recognize the scream as a siren. 

“What the fuck?” The change of circumstance seemed to make Nursey forget about his injury, and he quickly got to his feet behind the glass. 

“Something’s wrong,” Jack determined, a hard set to his jaw. In the low light, his eyes looked black. 

For all of the fear creeping up Bitty’s spine, he still managed to roll his eyes. “Yeah, I think we gathered that.” 

Jack ignored him, almost elbowing Shitty as he leaned out the door to glance up and down the hallway. 

“What’s going on?” 

“I don’t know-“

“Breech in Decontamination Chamber 174B.” A female voice rang out through the intercom, the same hypnotic and mechanical sounding voice that spoke for the elevators. “Halls Alpha Prior through Omega Five have been quarantined.” 

“A BREECH?” Holster’s voice cut through the still screaming siren. He looked furious, but Bitty was starting to realize that was just how any strong emotion looked on his face. 

Nursey looked a little unsteady, like he was going to be sick, and Ransom had doubled himself again, hands clenched in fists as he glanced uneasily around the walls. Shitty joined Jack by the door, the most serious expression Bitty had ever seen on his face. 

“What do we do?” 

“Quarantine in Hall Kappa Nine.”

“That’s us!” 

Even if Ransom hadn’t assured him of that fact, Bitty would have known by the sudden shifting in the wall. The doorway had just looked open, nothing more than a gaping hole, but now he could see where the door had been pushed into the wall, a heavy metal thing that reminded him of the medical bay he had gotten his tests done in. Above the entryway the red light began to flash faster as the door slid across their only way out. 

“What do we do?” 

Jack stood frozen in the closing doorway for half a second. When he glanced back at them, Bitty knew his black eyes weren’t a trick of the dim light. 

“Are we a team or not? Let’s go.” 

With a whoop of what was probably sheer adrenaline, Shitty charged after him, followed by the two Ransoms. In the steadily closing doorway, Holster turned back to Bitty. 

“You should stay here man, we don’t know what this is.”

Despite having no idea what was happening, and previously having no plans of leaving Nursey’s room, Bitty was suddenly insulted by the idea of being left behind. 

“I’m a part of this team,” he told Holster as the bigger man stepped through the door. There was just enough room left for Bitty to get through, but Holster wasn’t moving. 

“I know man.” His voice was gentle, but he was already glancing down the hall with a ferocity Bitty wasn’t sure he would ever be able to replicate. “And we love you, and we want to keep our team together. You’re not ready for this shit, and you’re no good to anyone dead.”

Bitty tried to make a break for it, shouldering his way past Holster, but one arm shot out to hold him in the room. The heavy door ground to a halt as it collided with Holster’s arm. Holster didn’t even seem to notice, and not for the first time Bitty wondered how much of him was actually made of metal.

“Stay here,” he repeated. “Keep Nursey company. He’s a bitch and he’s gonna be scared all by himself.”

“You’re a bitch!” Nursey countered.

Holster flashed a grin and withdrew his arm. The door slammed shut with a very final sounding BANG. The noise from outside was muted, but the red light still flashed, casting eerie shadows in the room. 

Behind the glass, Nursey was pacing, rubbing his hands together and pulling at strands of his hair. The flowers that decorated his hair and jewelry looked less like flowers now, and more like tiny green buds, still waiting to bloom. Bitty could have sworn that had been all different colors just a few minutes ago. 

“Ah, this is bullshit,” Nursey complained, more to himself than to Bitty. “I should be out there helping!”

“Helping with what? What on earth is going on?”

“I don’t know.” Nursey shook his head, eyes still trained on the closed door. When the light flashed across his skin, it looked like his tattoos were shifting, changing patterns across his skin. “But they don’t quarantine lightly. Especially not with this much-“ he waved his arms around, presumably indicating the lights and noise, “so I don’t know, but it’s something big.” 

Bitty bit his lip, eyeing the solid metal door facing him down. 

“I…should be out there.” 

“Should you?” Nursey crossed his arms, but even in the harsh lighting he didn’t look unkind. “Lardo said you just got down here. I mean, those guys have been training for years for this shit. Even I’ve had some training, but this could be serious man, you don’t even know if-“

“They’re my team too!” Bitty interrupted, the incessant flashing and the low hum of the siren causing him enough anxiety to forgo manners. 

Behind the glass, Nursey raised his hands in surrender. “Alright man, alright, whatever you say. But you’re kind of stuck here with me.” 

Bitty squared his shoulders, narrowing his eyes at the metal in front of him. “No I’m not.” 

“Bro, what-“

Bitty tuned Nursey out as he took a few steps back. Football had never come easy to him. In fact, after two broken bones, a lot of cowering on the field and ever-unfortunate locker incident, Bitty’s father had let him forget about football all together. 

Today, however, standing in the flashing red, with his friends just outside and possibly in danger, Bitty called on everything his father had ever taught him. Square up, shoulders back, head down, no fear, charge. 

“DUDE!” 

Bitty didn’t even hear Nursey’s shout, too focused on his own mission of escaping the room. The buzzing feeling that was ever present in his chest grew louder, spreading out through his limbs and vibrating in his teeth. He threw himself at the wall-

-And slammed to the ground with a jarring force as he hit the metal full on. 

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” 

Bitty groaned on the floor, unsure which part of his body to grab in pain since it was all in pain. 

“Okay, that didn’t work.” His voice sounded nasally, and he wondered if he had broken his nose. 

“Are you okay?” When Bitty tilted his head back, Nursey was as close to him as he could get, crouched in the corner of his glass prison. “Dude, I’m a healer but I can’t work through glass! Just, ah crap, just don’t move!” 

Bitty nodded, one hand coming up to feel his nose, and the other trying to brace against the wall. Though he just had his shoulder pressed against it, his hand went out farther, meeting no resistance. Ignoring Nursey’s advice, Bitty turned his head sharply, staring at the spot where his hand was currently disappearing through the wall. 

“Holy shit.”

Bitty tilted his head back again to look at Nursey. “I’ll come back for you, okay?”

“What?”

Ignoring Nursey’s shout of surprise, Bitty rolled over and phased straight into the wall. 

He was suddenly assaulted by the siren again, the wail now much louder in his still ringing ears. Bitty gripped the wall, his hands once again solid against the metal, to pull himself unsteadily to his feet. Despite all the drive that had encouraged him to follow after his team, he was suddenly at a loss of what to do. The hall was much more ominous in the flashing red emergency lights, some patches left in pitch black. 

Up and down the hall there was nothing, no sign of life or any movement beyond the shadows being thrown by the alarms. 

Bitty stood in his shadowy patch, trying to figure out his next move, when he heard the scream.

It wasn’t human, it was something shrill and animalistic. The sound sent a jolt through Bitty’s heart, his hair standing on end and goose bumps rising on his arms. It was unnatural and terrifying, and Bitty realized he had heard it before. Every instinct he had told him to run as far as he could.

He ground his teeth and took off in the direction it had come from. 

There was no plan, Bitty could admit that to himself. He just knew he needed to find his team, and do what he could to help. He wasn’t going to be just a name on the roster to fill out their quota. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it. 

The scream came again, much louder this time, and now from behind him. He all but slammed into the nearest wall to turn around, feeling a bit more confident as his arm slid neatly through it. All he had to do was concentrate, hold on to that shaky feeling deep in his chest and keep himself less than solid. It was his only move, and he was going to take advantage of it. 

He turned down a hallway, the echo of the cry still ringing in his ears, and felt his resolve begin to slip as he heard another sound. This one was more guttural, a deeper and angrier sound than the first two had been.

It had to have been made by a different creature. 

Bitty was shaking, and when he failed to fully make the turn into the nearest room, his body slid easily through the doorframe. 

It took him a moment to process the room he was standing in. He had expected another like Nursey’s, maybe a little bigger to house whatever monstrosities were screaming at one another, but nothing like the football field’s worth of space he was currently staring down. 

What use D-Con had for a giant indoor pool, Bitty wasn’t sure he wanted to know. The pool, or maybe it was more of a tank, stretched to the edges of the room, only a few feet of space separating the wall from the eerily green lit water. Laid above the surface of the water was a system of metal walkways, all thin rails linked together so there was no real solid ground anywhere over the water. A few walkways led up, leaving at least ten feet between the rungs and the top of the water. On the highest such walkway, was a monster. 

Fear shot straight through Bitty’s body, making his mouth go dry and his feet ground themselves hard to the floor as his head tried to make sense of what he was looking at. The thing was enormous, bigger than any horse on his aunt Carol’s farm and at least twice as wide. It may have been green or blue or red, but it was hard to tell between the glow of the pool and the flashing lights. The scaly tentacles were unmistakable even in the low light, a sickening squelching noise cutting through the sirens whenever it lashed one out. Bitty couldn’t see any eyes, but when the creature screamed again – that horrible deep groaning sound – he could see the rows of teeth. 

Suddenly, moving too fast and shrouded in too much darkness to make out, a second, smaller creature darted in, slamming against the larger monster’s side. The attacker let out a piercing cry, a high-pitched shriek that sounded like a mutated bird on steroids. It was the same cry that had first led Bitty in this direction, and the same one he had heard back in the arena during their first brawl. 

It was Jack. 

He was little more than a flash of black hair and pale skin in the light, dodging between the monster’s tentacles and fangs, but Bitty could see the sheen of his claws in the light. Something was leaking out of the monster’s sides, long streaks that Bitty had at first assumed was just general ooze which now appeared to be wounds. 

The rest of the team was nowhere in sight, but Bitty didn’t think now was the time to run for help. 

It happened so fast that Bitty almost missed when the creature flung a tentacle and hit Jack square in the chest. This time Jack didn’t make a sound, or at least Bitty couldn’t hear it as he went flying across the water, his body landing hard on another stretch of the walkway. He hit the metal and didn’t move. His head and one arm dangled lifelessly over the side, one foot almost dipping into the water on the other. 

“JACK!” 

If the monster heard Bitty, it didn’t react. Instead it began a lumbering journey forward, tentacles gripping onto the metal railings as it made its way towards Jack’s unconscious form. 

Bitty knew he had to do something. Jack may have been an asshole, and possibly the scariest person Bitty had ever met, but he was his teammate. Also Jack was his friend. Maybe. They were at least kind of on that track and Bitty wanted to see where that went.

“HEY!” Bitty screamed at the top of his lungs. He grabbed the nearest thing he could find, which happened to be net on the end of a long pole, and banged it against the metal of the walkway. Pushing his fear aside, Bitty bounded onto the walkway, heading towards the back of the monster. Below him the water was sloshing in the pool, though Bitty hadn’t seen Jack or the monster touch it. 

The tentacle creature seemed to slow a little at Bitty’s shout. 

“YEAH YOU!” He yelled again, knocking the net against the railings.

When the monster turned to face him, Bitty had expected fear to plant him to the spot, but it only pressed him to move faster. Maybe his fear was just maxed out at this point, he reasoned with himself as he clamored as fast as he could up the stairs suspended over the water. He had been at the edge of what humans were expected to be able to handle, and now he was on the other side, where it wasn’t so much panic as just a constant scream echoing in his head as he tried to keep himself moving. 

He gotten one foot on the highest rung when something gripped him hard by the leg and pulled. With a yelp, he let go of the net, and for the second time that day was slammed hard against a metal surface. The monster had one tentacle wrapped around his calf, and was pulling him closer. On instinct he grabbed at the tentacle, and found it surprisingly solid. 

And dry. 

The monster wasn’t from the pool. 

Across the pool, Jack was beginning to stir, shifting to his hands and knees. He was hurt, but he wasn’t dead. Maybe he needed a minute to catch his breath, or maybe he could call the others. Either way, he needed time, and Bitty was quickly running out of it as three rows of teeth were bearing down on him. Jack looked up just as Bitty made his decision. 

He had no training, and he had no reason to believe he had the power to do what he was going to try, but he was also out of options. 

Bitty grabbed the scaly appendage wrapped around his leg, and prayed to whatever deity was listening to give him strength. 

“BITTY!” 

The metal beneath him gave out and he found himself falling, but he wasn’t the only one. The monster gave a bellowing roar as it was pulled with Bitty, its enormous body fading through the metal like it didn’t exist. Bitty didn’t have time to take a breath before they hit the water, the impact knocked the wind out of him anyway as it engulfed his face and rushed into his ears.

All around him the tentacles flailed, trying and failing to get a grip on the walkways above them as they sank deeper. Bitty and the creature were pulled down, down, down, into the tank and Bitty realized multiple things at once. 

The first was that he had no idea how deep this tank actually went. The second was that if this tank was here, and this creature hadn’t come from it, then there was most likely something else lurking in the depths. The third, and possibly most important, was that he couldn’t get his leg free. He twisted in the creature’s grasp, desperately trying to break whatever connection he had forged to make them both intangible, but it wasn’t working. The water felt thicker as they sunk, and his throat was tight. He had never been good at holding his breath. 

Above them the water broke, a figure torpedoing down and slamming into the still wriggling monster’s body. Bitty found himself thrashed about, whipped through the water hard enough to make him almost open his mouth as the fight continued on. He saw that flash of claw again, managed to watch Jack land a truly impressive punch to the creature’s face, before he was yanked backwards once again. 

Desperation took precedence over actual strategy as Bitty tried to use claws he didn’t have to free himself from the grip on his leg. He ran his fingers uselessly over the armored scales, panic setting in, as the edges of his vision started going white. He needed to breathe and the reality of his imminent death made him want to cry out.

All he had to do was open his mouth. 

Just as he had given up, his fingers going lax, a different set of hands took over. Jack dug at the tentacle with a ferocity that might have terrified Bitty had it not been his only chance at survival. An inky substance began to leak from the growing wound, and Bitty felt the hold on him begin to loosen. Not concerned with Jack’s claws, Bitty joined in, punching the exposed flesh as hard as he could, trying to weaken the monster’s hold. 

As quickly as he had appeared, Jack was yanked away. The creature had a grip on his arm, pulling him away from the wound. Jack reached out, as if he were going to rip Bitty from the monster’s grasp, but didn’t make it in time. 

The shock seeing the genuine terror in Jack’s eyes and the violence of his departure, coupled with Bitty’s growing panic, made him slip. 

He opened his mouth in a scream. 

Immediately he was choking, water rushing in to fill his lungs. Bitty was thrown sideways as Jack suddenly reappeared, slamming hard into the squirming tentacle. He didn’t reach for Bitty, and he didn’t dig his claws in. Instead, he put his face to the wound, and bit. 

He hit a nerve, and Bitty was thrashed back and forth violently, his vision clouding and his heart pounding as Jack attacked the creature with renewed vigor. Suddenly, impossibly, Bitty felt the restraint around his leg loosen, and when the creature moved again he was tossed free. He knew it was too late, though. He couldn’t swim. Couldn’t even move for all the water in his chest.

He only had time to register that as Jack let go of the tentacle and grabbed him around the waist, he could also see Jack delivering another punch to the creature’s face, which was at least twenty feet away. It didn’t make any sense, but then the darkness closed in, and Bitty didn’t think about anything else.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warnings (continued):** Blood, violence, tentacles (not...the sexual kind but they are involved) and lots of descriptions of near drowning.
> 
> Thanks again to everyone who leaves kudos and comments, you're all beautiful and I appreciate every single one.


	6. Chill Will

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes seven to make a team, but it's always good to have a back up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a very long time since I updated and I'm very sorry. Also I changed the name of this fic!! Because I'm not getting paid to do this so I can do whatever I want!!!

Bitty resurfaced into consciousness with a hard jolt, a sharp pressure slamming into his chest. He gasped, choking on the water rising up his throat. The world was blurry, the flashing lights overhead taking a moment to focus in as Bitty tried to get a grip on reality. 

There were no sirens anymore, though whether the noise had ceased sometime during his underwater imprisonment or if it was a more recent development, he wasn’t sure. The red lights were still flashing, pulsing with a rhythm that seemed off now that there was no noise to accompany them. Water was dripping into his eyes, clinging to his eyelashes and burning with a chemical that didn’t smell like chlorine, but still made his skin tingle. 

“Wha-“ He couldn’t finish the sentence, another coughing fit overtaking him as what felt like fire raced up his throat along with the water. 

Jack was sitting beside him, he realized after a moment. They were on the metal platforms, hovering over the abyss of the tank he had been trapped in. He wondered if he rolled over if he could see the monster still lurking beneath. Was it dead? He wanted to ask, but found he still didn’t have the breath. Regardless, Jack didn’t seem too concerned. He was perched on the edge of platform, one leg still hanging over, and watching Bitty closely. He didn’t seem to be in any rush.

Bitty turned his head, and immediately remembered the last thing he had seen before he had lost consciousness – Jack punching the monster, as a pair of arms had lifted him free. 

Jack had not saved him, and Jack was not currently sitting next to him. 

Had Bitty the mobility and energy to do so, he might have tried to run. As he had neither, and he had no idea where he would go anyway, he decided to take his chances with the stranger who had saved his life. 

It wasn’t polite to try to guess someone’s gender when you weren’t absolutely certain, his mama had taught him that early, but in the privacy of his own head he thought it wouldn’t be too rude to call his savior male. He had black hair like Jack’s, but it was wilder, and didn’t seem to be concerned with the fact that it was very wet and therefore was supposed to be lying flat. He didn’t look well, his pale skin glowing a sickly looking color in the light of the pool, his bones making valleys of shadows across his chest. He had four scars running along the side of his neck, all so perfectly in line that Bitty almost forgot his current predicament out of curiosity. 

“Are you okay?” The boy asked, or maybe the creature, Bitty decided as he focused in. His voice was higher than Bitty had been expecting, and he definitely had more than one row of sharpened triangles for teeth in his mouth. His eyes were wide and black, and when he shifted, Bitty realized he wasn’t sure if he was wearing a black wetsuit, or if was a part of his skin. 

Bitty nodded as the boy continued to stare at him, something like concern pulling his wide mouth down. 

“Jack,” Bitty managed to huff out around the pain in his throat. “Where-“

“Are you Jack?” The other boy interrupted, his hint of a frown disappearing instantly. He swung his leg gently back and forth over the side, unconcerned with the creature below. He also didn’t seem to notice he had cut off a man who was having a very difficult time speaking in the first place. “Or is Jack the other one?”

“Other one.” The tightness in his throat was lessening, making it easier to speak. 

“Oh, he’s right here.” The boy with too many teeth and the eerie skin leaned over so he could peer over the other side of the platform, down into the water. He reached out, curling his fingers over the edge of the metal for a better grip. He didn’t seem to have the correct amount of fingers, and there was thick webbing between each one. 

Before Bitty could ask what he meant, there was an explosion of water to his right, where Jack burst forth with a gasp. Bitty saw his hands before the rest of him, long dark claws wrapping around the edge before he hauled his body up onto the metal.

Jack collapsed next to him on the landing, panting hard. Water was running off of him, the drops hitting the water below like a rainstorm, and Bitty had never heard a better sound in his life.

“It’s dead,” Jack assured after a tense pause.

“You okay?”

Jack laughed, all teeth as he closed his still black eyes. “Am I okay?” He made a sound in a language Bitty didn’t understand, but he recognized the curse for what it was anyway. “Are you?”

Bitty laughed. “Yeah, I’m…alive.”

“Who’s he?” Jack waved a hand at the other boy, still perched on the edge of the metal, like he was considering just slipping back into the water. He seemed to be watching something beneath them for a moment before realizing he was being spoken about. 

“Hello!” 

“I don’t know, but he saved my life so he’s my new best friend.” 

The boy gasped. “Do you really mean that?”

“You saved my life,” Jack interrupted before Bitty could respond. 

“I almost got us killed,” Bitty challenged. He had comment point to add, a very cutting one he was sure of it, but it died on his tongue as Jack shifted, pulling himself closer to Bitty. One hand, the claws retracting back into his fingers, moved to rest on Bitty’s thigh while Jack’s head settled on his chest. 

It was a bit like having a panther decide to curl up on your lap, Bitty decided. It was sweet and amazing and he had a very strong urge to pet the head on his chest, but there was something paralyzing about it as well. 

“I would have died -we both would have died- if you hadn’t done what you did,” Jack told him, his voice soft enough that Bitty almost didn’t hear him over the dripping of the water. “I was stupid,” he continued, and Bitty felt he might have been talking more to himself than to Bitty. “I shouldn’t have split us up like that; I thought I could take it.”

“You did take it!” Bitty told him, resisting the urge to pet and instead just resting one hand on Jack’s shoulder. “You punched that thing in the face? Oh my gosh, it was TERRIFYING, but you just…you just tore into him.”

“Wow, you two are such a good pair!” 

Bitty jolted when the third of their group spoke, having almost completely forgotten about him. 

“You both did great! It was so wild! You were like, ‘bam!’ And then he was like ‘bam!’ and that thing didn’t stand a chance!” 

Bitty tilted his head to watch as the boy from the tank flung his hands about with his retelling of what had just happened. He sighed deeply, a wide grin still on his face. “You guys are super cool.”

“Thanks for saving me.” Bitty sent him a weak grin back. “I was about done for.”

The boy tossed his head, swinging his leg back and forth quickly and Bitty thought he might have been embarrassed. “Aw, it was nothing. I just wanted to help.”

Something was off about the way he spoke, and it wasn’t until Jack said “Stop that,” that Bitty realized he was being mimicked. The long vowels and tilt in his words was being repeated back at him, mixed with the slurring ‘zja’ sound and the hard ‘z’ that seemed to permeate Jack’s speech. 

It was like he didn’t have any sort of accent of his own and was relying on outside sources to provide it for him. 

He winced, glancing down at his webbed hands sheepishly. “Sorry.” Though he apologized, Bitty didn’t miss the long ‘O’ stolen from Jack. 

“WHAT IS GOING ON?”

All three of them jumped. Jack bolted into a sitting position, one clawed hand thrown out like he was about to strike. Bitty’s head struck the metal, his teeth knocking together as Jack’s other hand slammed hard into Bitty’s chest, pinning him to the ground. Bitty was uncertain as to whether it was meant to be reassuring, or if he had simply forgotten that Bitty was there. 

Bitty tilted his head to get a view of their newest intruder, and even upside down he could make out the sharp white of a lab coat approaching with a concerning speed. When Jack relaxed his stance, Bitty was able to flip himself around, and found the lab coat was covering a small angry looking woman, with short black hair and large round glasses. 

“What in all the world have you done to Christopher’s tank?”

“What did we do to it?” Jack sputtered, sounding indignant. 

“Christopher?” Bitty asked, feeling rather stupid as the woman sent him a glare that told him he should feel that way. Christopher was obviously his savior, though Bitty wouldn’t have thought of him as a Christopher; perhaps something with a lot more consonants and maybe an apostrophe or two. Christopher sounded like someone Bitty had gone to Sunday school with, not a shark boy living in a research facility tank in a secret underground bunker.

“Sorry, mom,” Christopher mumbled, head down and shoulders high around his pointed ears. 

This time Bitty had the decency to keep his wayward ‘mom?’ echo to himself. 

The woman in the lab coat brushed past Jack and Bitty, unconcerned with either of them as she descended on Christopher in a flurry of angry words and worried hands, checking over his face and arms for injuries. 

“It fell into my tank!” Christopher tried to argue weakly as his mother poked at the cuts on his neck, which separated themselves and revealed gills. “What was I supposed to do?”

“They dragged it in,” she countered, pointing an accusing finger at Bitty and Jack. Jack frowned, looking annoyed. Bitty looked away. 

Christopher shoved her hands away, though it looked like the movement was gentler than he tried to make it appear. “It would have gone in anyway. I helped them!” 

“He did,” Bitty interjected, doing his best to ignore the death glare the woman was sending his way. He chanced a glance down at the shiny silver name tag attached to the front of her coat. “Dr. Chow, I think I would have died if Christopher hadn’t pulled me out of the tank.”

“I think there would have been a lot more damage over all, if Christopher hadn’t acted so fast,” Jack joined in. He straightened his shoulders, like he was trying to draw himself up as tall as he could without actually rising to his feet. 

Christopher, one hand still holding Dr. Chow’s hand at bay, was watching them both with somehow even wider eyes than before. It was hard to tell, behind the scales and gills and rows of razor sharp teeth, but Bitty thought he looked a little near tears. 

“You really think so?” He asked, and Bitty felt a part of his heart, or what was left of it after coming so close to death, melt. His initial reaction to Christopher had been fear, but in less than five minutes he found himself wanting to wrap a blanket around his shoulders and tell him how great he was. 

Bitty was finding a pattern in himself at Samwell.

“Absolutely,” Jack managed to get out, just before a new sort of chaos exploded. 

“JACK YOU FUCKIN’ BEAUT!” 

Jack and Shitty both almost went tumbling back into the water as Shitty all but tackled his still soaked friend. 

“Get off of me!” Jack hissed as Shitty began peppering his cheeks with kisses. 

“Where did you go?” Holster demanded, making his way up onto the platform with an exhausted looking Ransom trailing behind. “I thought you were supposed to stay with Shitty!”

“I was with Shitty,” Jack shot back. He had one hand wrapped around the back of Shitty’s neck, holding him off as he glared up at Holster. The black in his eyes had receded back, allowing flecks of light blue to peek through, but it didn’t make his scowl any less sinister. As much as Bitty was growing accustomed to Jack, he didn’t think he would be able to stand as straight as Holster if Jack was pinning him with that glare. “We got separated in the Omega sector and I had to take off after it alone.”

“You should have called for backup!” Holster insisted. At his sides his hands were balled into fists. His metal one didn’t seem to want to make the movement as smoothly, his fingers holding back from connecting fully with one another.

Jack was on his feet in an instant, water cascading down and sounding much more sinister as it hit the water this time. Holster was taller than him, and the metal added bulk that even Jack couldn’t compete with, but somehow next to Jack the difference didn’t seem as noticable. “There wasn’t time. I had it.” 

“Did you? Because it sounds like you almost got yourself, Bitty, and…” he trailed off, glancing at Christopher. 

“Chowder!” Christopher supplied, and had Bitty not been so concerned with the impending fight about to break out between a cyborg and a monster he both considered his friends, he might have questioned that response further. 

“You almost got Chowder killed and he’s not even a part of this!” Holster’s voice was booming, his metal arm creaking as he moved it too fast in his excitement. 

“I’m okay,” Christopher-now-Chowder assured them both, looking more worried now at the growing tension. 

“That’s enough!” Bitty attempted to stagger to his feet, unsure what to do when he suddenly found both Holster and Jack’s arms extended out to him to assist. He took a hand from each and didn’t let go as he stood. “Look, whatever happened, we’re all okay now. 

Holster gave him a look, softer than the one that he had fixed Jack with, but looking no less betrayed.

“Maybe Jack messed up-“ Bitty ignored Jack’s huff “-but it all turned out all right. Chris, uh, Chowder helped us, and that thing is dead and we’re all in one piece.” He gently released both of their hands, and didn’t miss the way they moved almost in sync as they lowered their arms.

“Both of ‘em are dead,” Ransom corrected. He had made it up the platform and was currently slumped against Holster’s back. Holster crooked behind him, holding Ransom steady. 

“Both of them?” Bitty gasped.

“There were two,” Jack confirmed. 

“Ugly bastards,” Ransom huffed. Holster turned to hold Ransom a little more soundly. “Had to multiple like…fifteen goddamn times.” 

“Does that hurt?” Bitty asked before he could stop himself.

Ransom rolled his eyes. “You ever had fifteen separate streams of thought running through your head at once?”

Bitty was tempted to answer with ‘every day of my life’ but figured his own anxieties weren’t quite the same as literally having fifteen versions of yourself exist simultaneously. 

“Is everyone all right?” 

Bitty jumped, having not even noticed Lardo’s approach. She was in a loose tee shirt and jeans. Her socks didn’t match and her hair was sticking almost straight up in the back. 

“They wake you up for this?” Shitty asked, tossing an arm casually around her shoulders. “Nothing to worry about, we have everything under control.”

“What-“

The sound that erupted from the water behind Bitty immediately shut down all cognitive thought processes in his head as the thought hit him with horrific clarity: It wasn’t dead. He spun around, braced for a fight as the monster breached the surface with a deafening screech, water rolling down its grotesque form as the water around it began to turn an inky black with its blood. 

Bitty’s heart was pounding and his fists raised instinctively, like he was going to fight it bare handed. He backed up as far as he could, only one thought in his head repeating over and over: I’m not going back in. Before he could make another plan of attack he was being jerked suddenly backwards and for one horrifying moment he thought it was a tentacle that had snuck up from behind. 

The bite of claws in his side and the heavy weight of Jack’s arm around his chest was a startling relief. 

“It’s dead.” Jack’s voice was close in his ear, almost a whisper. He could feel Jack’s breath against his skin, coming in quick pants as his own fear spiked. “It’s dead. It just floated to the surface,” Jack repeated, a little louder as he straightened up. While Bitty had raised his fist, Jack had raised one hand as well, long shining claws fully extended out as his other arm held Bitty in a vice grip to his chest. 

All around them the others slowly began to relax, and Bitty had a moment of thankfulness that he wasn’t the only one who had panicked. Lardo and Dr. Chow both lowered weapons that looked vaguely like guns as Chowder’s shoulders slumped in relief and three Ransoms turned back into one, leaning so heavily on Holster it seemed he was the only thing holding him on his feet. 

Bitty opened his mouth, intent on requesting Jack release him now that the danger had passed, but was cut short as Jack sighed heavily, the effort ruffling his hair and tickling his ear in a way that had him frozen in Jack’s embrace. Jack pitched forward slightly, the fight draining out of his body in one movement. 

It was a movement that Bitty was privy to every part of, as Jack’s knees brushed against the backs of his thighs and his chest pressed itself into Bitty’s shoulder blades. His arm was feeling heavier by the second. When Chowder turned to look at them, his own panic slowly leaving his face, he took in the sight of Bitty and Jack and gave Bitty a knowing smile that left a cold feeling in his stomach. 

They were both dripping wet and adrenaline had Bitty blood pounding in his ears and his heart slamming against his chest. He had never been high on anything except what they had given him when he had his tonsils removed, but he imagined it must feel something like this. He was scared and confused and had just faced down his own mortality against a mutated monster and it was a combination of all of these factors that was making him so hyper aware of everything. 

It was all of that and nothing else. Nothing that he had time for at least. 

Bitty forgot about the claws pricking into his sides as he jerked away, but thankfully some part of him had realized the danger and Jack’s hands slid through his torso like he was made of nothing but light. 

He pretended he had that kind of control. He pretended it wasn’t just because he was suddenly terrified for reasons that did not involve monsters. At least not the dead one in the water. 

“Well, thank goodness that’s over!” Bitty exclaimed. If his voice was too high he hoped everyone would assume it was because of the creature currently oozing in the water. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jack flexing his fingers, the long black claws slowly retracting back into his fingers with the movement. 

“What the fuck even is that thing?” Shitty asked, stepping closer to the edge than Bitty would have ever dared. 

“This is not a hangout spot!” 

Everyone jumped as Dr. Chow’s exclamation. Bitty had almost forgotten she was there. 

“Everyone needs to get out so we can begin the process of cleaning this mess up, NOW.” She pointed one shaking finger back the way they had come, looking far too put out for these shenanigans. 

“I’m really sorry, Chowder.” Bitty frowned at his new friend. “I didn’t mean to ruin your tank.”

Chowder shrugged as Dr. Chow scowled. “It’s okay. It was fun to fight with you guys.” He did a few more punching motions with his hands and something about it seemed to soften Dr. Chow a bit. 

“You did do great,” she conceded, the beginnings of the first smile Bitty had seen from her forming on her face. “You’re going to make a great fighter.”

“Yeah I am!” 

“You are, which is why I want to offer you a spot on our team.” 

All eyes turned to Jack in shocked unison at the sudden declaration. 

“Dude.”

“What?”

“Holy shit.”

Chowder’s mouth fell open in shock, at least two inches too wide to be considered human, and Bitty had to look away as at least five rows of crooked and brutal teeth were revealed. “Really?”

Jack stepped forward. His hair was clinging to his face in direct contrast to the perpetual fluff Chowder had. The corners of his mouth were turned up in the barest hint of a smile. “Really. We need a seventh member to be an official team. I don’t know how you are on land-“

“I’m fast!” Chowder interrupted. His back was straight, shoulders pitched back and chin forward and he looked a little bit more like the monster Bitty had first assumed him to be. “Not as fast as in the water, but I’m not slow.”

“It’s true,” interjected Dr. Chow, whom Bitty would have assumed would have been against such a change of plans. She looked eager for Jack to approve of her son. “He’s strong as a horse too, water enhances it, but land doesn’t drag him down.”

Jack nodded at them both. “Good. It would be good to have someone who can fight in water too, just in case.”

“Wait!” Lardo raised a hand, waving it quickly at Jack. For the first time since Bitty had met her, there seemed to be an edge of panic to her eyes, a slip of control he wouldn’t have associated with her. She spared a glance at Chowder. “Not that I don’t approve of this, or that I don’t think he should be on the team, but he’s the eighth member of the team, not the seventh.” 

Shitty worried his lip between his teeth and he and Jack shared a glance that put Bitty at much at unease as it did Lardo. 

“What?” She demanded. Her hands balled in fists as she glanced between them.

“Lards-“

“Larissa-“ 

“What?”

Jack sighed. “We need this team to be the best it can, and if you’re hiding Poindexter I’m assuming it’s because there’s something about him that’s going to jeopardize this.” 

“I’m not hiding him!” She insisted. 

Even Ransom and Holster had to look away at that lie. 

“You’re not?” Jack challenged. 

“Uh, I don’t want to take anyone’s place-“ 

“You’re not,” Jack and Lardo said as one, neither breaking their staring contest to assure Chowder. 

Chowder tapped the tips of his claws together, shooting a nervous glance at Bitty who tried to look reassuring. “Uh, okay.” 

“Let’s go meet him right now.” 

It was a victory for Lardo, as Jack looked genuinely shocked by the offer, his poker face slipping as his eyes went wide. Even Bitty 

“Seriously?” Shitty asked.

Lardo nodded, her arms crossed defensively across her chest. “Yep.” With one last glare at them all she took off down the ramp, leaving everyone staring at her back as she disappeared around the corner. 

Ransom and Holster scrambled after her instantly. Shitty clapped Jack on the shoulder before following. 

Jack sighed, his fingers rubbing at his temples like he might have a headache coming on. “Sorry about everything Dr. Chow, and you Chowder. We’ll be back to talk about details and training schedules.” And then he was gone, chasing after his disappearing team, leaving a soaking wet Bitty standing with Chowder and his now appeased mother. 

“Uh, yeah, sorry for everything, and thanks for saving my life.” Bitty shuffled awkwardly a few steps backwards, the way Jack had taken off. 

Dr. Chow had her arms crossed, but she seemed less angry than before. Chowder offered up a wide webbed wave. “No problem.” He lowered his hand and shrugged. There was a brightness in his dark eyes that was both dangerous and endearing. “Was getting kind of boring down here anyway.” 

Two men in lab coats and heavy masks passed Bitty, a long snake like tube carried between them. They hunched down by the water and began pulling out instruments from their bags. The cleanup was underway and Bitty needed to leave. 

“Well, it was good to meet you Chowder. I’ll see you…sometime.” 

Chowder grinned, all teeth. Dr. Chow turned to talk to another worker, and Chowder crouched by the water, legs dangling over the edge. “Thank your partner for me. He’s a really great fighter, and you two are really cute together.”

The words slammed into Bitty like a punch, his face burning at the accusation. He remembered Chowder’s earlier glances and suddenly it all made sense.

“Oh, no-“

“See you later Bitty!” Chowder waved once more before slipping beneath the now black water, leaving Bitty gaping at the ring of bubbles he left behind. 

“We’re not dating,” he whispered, limbs dangling useless at his side. It earned him nothing but a sideways glance from a man in a HAZMAT suit. 

“BITTLE.” 

Bitty jumped at Jack’s booming voice, turning to see his new captain glaring at him from the entryway. “Are you coming or not?”

Bitty’s face was still on fire, his heart hammering in his chest and now there was no denying that it was about something entirely unrelated to the monstrosity currently being drained from the tank. 

“Yeah,” he squeaked, waving his hand when he wasn’t certain if Jack had heard. 

Jack’s head disappeared around the corner once more, and Bitty let out a shaky breath. 

Jack might just be the death of him after all, for reasons he had absolutely not seen coming. 

_X_ _X_ _X_

“Okay, so where are we actually going?” 

Bitty was glad he hadn’t been the one to ask, not that he found himself in any position to be asking questions. He trailed behind the group, arms crossed over his chest as he followed as closely behind Ransom and Holster as he could without drawing attention to himself. It was Shitty who had asked, somewhere up ahead of the two giants, third in line of their little procession behind Jack and Lardo. 

They hadn’t left D-Con yet, still heading down the winding halls, and had taken three separate sets of stairs leading down. The farther down they went, the higher Bitty’s anxiety crept, but at least it kept him distracted from less helpful thoughts. 

“We’re going to meet Poindexter,” Lardo responded, no more helpful than she had been five minutes ago. There was a hard edge to her voice, her shoulders up high and tense as she led the group with quick steps. 

“You’ve kept him from us for at least two months, and now you’re deciding it’s time for us to meet him?” Jack challenged, looking no more amused at the turn of events. 

When Lardo didn’t respond, he sighed. “Lardo, we already have our seventh-“

“You have eight now,” she insisted. The hall they were in was long and white, and Bitty hadn’t seen a single door in over three minutes. When the finally turned a corner, the hall came to an abrupt end, a solid steel door set abruptly in the plaster wall. Lardo held up the tag hanging on a lanyard around her neck to a panel next to the door. There was a quick beep and then the door was opening, as easy as if she had turned a knob.

“Uh, Lards?” Shitty crossed his arms over his chest, in unison with Ransom. 

A second later the cold hit him. 

Bitty had spent one summer working as a cashier at the local Piggly Wiggly, and had only had the misfortune of stepping into the industrial freezer in the back one time, but he still remembered it. It had been an all-encompassing cold that slammed against the summer heat like a brick wall when that door had opened. It was different than a natural chill, bone deep and unsettling and wrong. 

The smell of freezer burn and artificial ice was almost exactly the same.

The biggest difference was the light. Where the freezer he remembered had been almost painfully bright, this was near complete darkness. Slowly, like they were waking up after quite a long time, small red lights began to shine into existence along the floor, leading forward like a movie theater aisle. 

“Where are we?”

“It’s The Freezer,” Holster supplied as Lardo continued her measured steps into the cold. 

“The Freezer?” Jack gasped, sounding more angry than surprised. 

There were cold wisps of air rolling along the floor, disappearing back into the darkness of The Freezer, and above them a low rumble began. It took Bitty a moment to recognize it as an alarm, possibly warning them to Please Close The Door, lest they let more of the cold escape. 

Jack was engulfed in the darkness almost immediately as he stepped over the threshold, his voice rising and echoing back as he called after Lardo. 

Shitty sent a glance that Bitty assumed was supposed to be reassuring at him before he followed. 

Bitty heard Ransom sigh, and then before he knew what was happening Ransom was on his left and Holster on his right, leading him into the darkness. As soon as they stepped through the door, the massive steel door closed behind them, leaving Bitty trapped in the dark and cold between Holster and Ransom. He was only in the darkness for a few seconds however, before his eyes began to adjust. There were no lights overhead where they stood, only the thin red emergency lights running along the floor, an obvious pathway of where they were supposed to go. The red broke and faded in certain places, where the icy air became too thick for the lights to permeate. The eerie glow sent Holster and Ransom’s faces into stark shadows, catching every now and then in Ransom’s eyes or the metal of Holster’s jaw. He couldn’t make out either of their expressions, but Ransom kept one arm solid around his shoulders.

Up ahead he could see the lights getting brighter, a few red bulbs set in the ceiling as the hallways widened out into separate rooms on either side of their dark walkway. Jack and Lardo were still arguing, though it sounded more one sided on Jack’s part. 

“You ever been down here before?” 

Bitty jumped, and Ransom’s grip around him tightened to hold him steady as he slipped on what was probably ice. He hadn’t noticed Shitty, waiting for them in the doorway of a room that had no lights inside of it whatsoever. Whatever was waiting for them in that room, Bitty was eager to get past. 

Ransom shook his head. “No, how about you?”

Bitty thought he saw Shitty shake his head. “Nah. Holster?”

“Yeah.” 

For as much as Holster liked to talk, his sudden lack of words seemed to speak more than anything else. Bitty shivered despite the two heavy bodies closing him in on either side. 

“What is this place?” He finally asked as the hallways opened up. They were in a large room, but just how large he couldn’t tell in the dim lights. All around were containers, giant metal tubes reaching up to a low ceiling. He might have thought they could have just been for support, had each one not been smoking that same freezing cold, thin wisps spilling over from perfect lines made in each tube. It looked like they each contained a couple gallons of dry ice. There were control panels set alongside each tube, with an icy keypad and hazy monitor screen attached. 

Bitty leaned away from Ransom for a moment to stare at the closest one, squinting his eyes as he tried to read the sloppy writing of a piece of paper attached to the screen. 

It was Holster, his non-metal hand thankfully, that pulled him away. “It’s the Freezer,” he explained. “It’s where they keep the really dangerous things. Don’t touch anything.”

“What do you mean, really dangerous?” Bitty asked, feeling a new sort of chill creep up his spine that didn’t have anything to do with the freezing temperatures. 

“It means Lardo wants us to throw away a good thing with Chowder to let out a monster,” Jack interjected before Lardo had the chance. 

“Chowder is a great idea,” Lardo’s voice snapped from somewhere in the field of freezing tubes. Farther up ahead he thought he saw her shadow move, the dim lights illuminating the pale skin of her arms for a second before she was gone again. “He’ll make a great addition, but Poindexter is coming too.” 

Jack sighed. Bitty could see him now, standing almost directly above one of the tracks of red lights. The way the light caught his face made him look distinctly not human. 

“Lardo-“

“Come on, you’re all taking way too long.” Her voice left no room for debate. 

Bitty couldn’t take his eyes off of the tubes as they passed more and more, the scale of the room feeling endless. “How many of those things are there?” He asked as they passed another dozen, still trying and failing to read anything marked on a single one. 

“Too many,” Holster said.

There was something like bile rising in the back of his throat, his jaw felt tight and his stomach rolling. Something was wrong. Even more wrong than the feelings Jack had given him that first night. 

The only sound in the Freezer was the continual hiss of the cooling systems and their echoing footsteps on the floor. Bitty’s voice was only a whisper, but he still knew they all heard him when he finally managed to swallow the lump in his throat to ask. “What’s in them?”

No one answered. 

Bitty thought for a moment that the lights weren’t working up ahead, only to realize the blackness in front of him wasn’t from lack of light, but simply the color of the structure before him. It was like a small room, completely contained inside the larger chamber they were in, disrupting the otherwise uniform alignment of the metal chambers. The wall was maybe ten feet in length, and Bitty couldn’t see how deep it went. There did not appear to be any door to the mysterious box. 

Lardo materialized on his right, her pale fingers glowing in the harsh red light and moving quickly against the wall, lighting up a small keypad. He could hear her teeth chattering, and the tips of her fingers shook against the number pad, but didn’t slow. 

“This Poindexter?” Jack asked. He stood to Bitty’s left, arms crossed as he stared at the dark container in front of them. 

“Yes.” 

“Okay!” Bitty raised his hands, and managed not to wince as his voice echoed sharp in the quiet room. “What is going on? Who is Poindexter, what is this place, and what is in those tubes?”

Before anyone could answer, Lardo slammed her hand down against the wall, something flashing under her palm, before the world erupted in fire. 

Bitty shouted in surprise, and he thought he heard Shitty do the same. He stumbled back, hand grabbing against the nearest solid object to hold himself steady. It only took a few seconds for his brain to catch up to his instincts, and inform himself that he was not actually in any danger. 

What he had taken for an attack turned out to be a screen, cut into the black box and showing them all a steady image of a raging inferno. The flames licked at the screen, intense and terrifying and so horrifically real, but there was no sound and no heat to accompany the show. Bitty relaxed enough to let go of Jack’s now well abused shirt and step back out of his friend’s personal space. 

Had he the warmth in his body to blush, he would have. 

“What the shit?” Shitty whispered, creeping around Jack’s other side to get closer to the blazing screen. In the dark of the room, the glowing screen was almost painful to look at. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Mutation,” Lardo told them. Her hands were clasped behind her back. “It was a weak ability-“

“Jesus, you call that weak?”

“-But three months ago Mr. Poindexter had the unfortunate luck of being struck by a bolt of lightning. It magnified his abilities and left him unable to control them.”

“Wait a minute,” Bitty pushed past them all to approach the screen. He narrowed his eyes, searching frantically through the pounding flames as he began to realize it was not a screen he was looking at.

It was a window.

He turned to Lardo. “Is there a person in there?” 

Lardo nodded, stepping forward to join him. “William Poindexter, age 18, born in Portland, Maine. Parents died when he was five, and he has recently aged out of the foster care system.” She sent a sideways glance at Bitty and opened her mouth, but Holster cut her off.

“So no one’s looking for him.”

Lardo turned back to the window of fire. Her cheeks looks strangely hollow. She nodded. 

Jack shifted, running a hand over his face. “So what do you want from us here, Lardo? Because all I’m seeing is an unstable power source that may or may not be a human being in there.” 

“He is a human being,” Lardo informed him curtly. “He can calm himself down enough to speak, but when he’s left alone he tends to-“ She cut herself off, motioning with her hand in a spinning fashion. 

“Fire tornado.” Ransom whistled low, leaning in close to the glass. He raised one hand but seemed unwilling to touch his fingertips to the glass. “Is he allowed out?” 

“Not yet, or not without surveillance and a monitoring coll-“

“No.” 

Lardo blinked, turning her head to finally look at Jack. “Excuse me?”

“No,” he repeated. “This is too much of a liability; we can’t trust that he won’t drag us down.” 

“I agree with Jack.” Holster’s jaw was set, the steel grating against his skin in a way that made it perfectly clear how he felt about making that statement. “We can’t risk it.” 

“Didn’t Snowy come from The Freezer?” Ransom asked. 

It was dark in The Freezer, and Bitty could only make out everyone’s faces in bits and pieces in the shadows. The red light caught Holster’s one eye, the one that he had already suspected wasn’t organic, and it was only in the reflection that Bitty caught the way his eyes narrowed. “Snowy was an accident. We’re talking about purposefully dragging someone out.”

“He’s not in yet,” Lardo defended. “He’s only in temporary containment. He’s scheduled for permanent holding next week. Unless we get him out.”

“What’s permanent holding?” Bitty asked. 

“I vote we let him out,” Ransom spoke up, straightening up and stepping back from the glass. 

Holster frowned. “This isn’t about letting him out, it’s about letting him join our team.”

“I’m with Ransom. If Lardo thinks this is a good idea, then I’m sure it’s a fan-fucking-tastic idea.” Shitty grinned at everyone in the group, his hands sliding into his pockets. He leaned back on his heels next to Lardo, watching the fiery inferno in front of them like it was a scenic country side and not glimpsing into Hell itself. 

“That’s two to two.” 

“Nursey voted yes.” Lardo turned her back to the window, back straight and arms crossed. “I talked to him about it before you guys, and he said he wanted him to join.”

“Nursey’s vote doesn’t count,” Jack said. He raised a hand as both Shitty and Lardo began to protest. “He’s not here, and he didn’t know there was another option. He hasn’t even met Chowder.” 

“Well then I guess it comes down to Bitty.” 

All eyes suddenly fell to Bitty, and he was highly grateful for the darkness they were all confined in. It was possible now though that more of his face was on display with the glaring brightness of the fire.

The fire was a pretty difficult factor to ignore. He was doing his best to picture a person in there. Was there a person in there, or did they dissolve into the fire when it exploded? When was the last time someone had spoken to William Poindexter? Did he even want to be on their team? There were all questions he wanted to ask, but what he asked instead was: “What’s permanent holding?” 

“Bitty-“ Jack began to speak but Lardo cut him off.

“I’ll show you.” 

She brushed past them both, turning away from the fire and back towards the nearest silver cylinder. 

“Lardo.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Fuck, Lardo, come on.”

She ignored all the concerns around her, and no one really made a move to stop her as she began typing in the nearest keypad. There was a horrible sound, caught between a screech and ice grinding against metal and then the tube was moving. The thin line from which the freezing fog had been emitting was shifting, the top half moving up and the bottom moving down, breaking itself into plates that moved into one another as a clear tube was revealed underneath. For a moment, there was only fog, until the contents of the container became clear. 

It took Bitty almost a full minute to process what he was looking at. 

She was wrapped in the same sort of jumpsuit he had worn to the brawl, though the white of hers was faded and the red was almost completely gone. She looked like she was floating, suspended in the middle of the tube with none of her limbs touching the edges. There were tubes all over her, running into her arms and her sides and one in her neck and another connecting to a surgical looking mask that covered her nose and mouth. All of the tubes tangled together and ran to the bottom of her container, disappearing into the floor. Her long black hair was pulled back in a braid, and floated behind her like a tail. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving.

She couldn’t have been more than 19. 

Bitty tried and failed to speak multiple times before he managed to get a word out. “Who…” He trailed off, his breath abandoning him as he took in the sight. 

“This is Jenny Miller. She is currently in permanent containment, with no plans of being released.”

“She’s alive?” Bitty managed, taking a step closer to the container. Someone grabbed his shoulder , and warned him not to touch the glass. 

“Some people say they are, but it’s a death sentence.” Lardo frowned at the unconscious Ms. Miller. “They don’t take people out after they go in, they just pretend like they’re going to.” 

The grip on his shoulder tightened enough to bruise, and now Bitty was certain it was Holster. 

“How long has she been in there?” Bitty asked.

Lardo leaned over, looking at the now bright blue screen in front of her. “Says she went in 94’.” 

Bitty stumbled back, and two pairs of hands held him steady. “She…she would have only been a little kid. How could they do that?” 

Lardo shook her head. “No, she was 18 when she went in.” She looked back at Jenny, tilting her head as she considered the girl. “You don’t age in The Freezer.” 

Bitty didn’t remember covering his nose and mouth with his hands, but at least it was something to do with his hands as panic overtook him. Jenny Miller had been frozen in time for almost twenty years. 

“What, how…why?” 

“It’s where they put people they can’t release and they can’t handle in the base,” Holster told him. His grip tightened again enough for Bitty to cry out. From somewhere behind him Jack made a sound and Holster released him like he had been burned. 

Lardo was touching the keypad again, and then the metal was screeching again, echoing off the walls as it began to envelope Jenny Miller once more. 

Bitty wondered when the last time anyone had even looked at Jenny had been. He wondered when the next time would be.

“William Poindexter is set for permanent containment in eight days, unless someone vouches for him.” Lardo repeated in the ensuing silence. In the darkness she met Bitty’s eye. “Eight days, and he becomes just like Jenny.” 

“No,” Jack repeated, though he sounded less harsh than before. “We can’t save everyone Lardo-“

“We can save one.” Shitty didn’t look at Jack, but he didn’t move away either.

In the silence that followed, it seemed no one had anything to say. Lardo sighed, her shoulders sagging. “Holster, you-“ 

“I said what I have to say, now it’s Bitty’s turn.” 

Once more, all eyes fell to him. “Up to you Bits. You saw what Poindexter can do, he’s not stable.” 

“This team could be your only shot at getting home, Bittle.” Jack’s tone was even softer now, a gentle reminder instead of a sharp jab, and Bitty felt his stomach twist in knots. They were both right, it looked like there was only one way he was getting home, and trusting a room full of fire and chaos with that precious victory seemed reckless at best. 

He had one chance at getting home this year. 

More importantly, William Poindexter only had one shot at not being forgotten forever. 

“He should be on the team.” 

Shitty sighed in relief, and Ransom gave him a half smile.

“Nursey’ll agree.” Ransom jostled his shoulder gently. “I’ve known him for a long time, and he wouldn’t leave someone down here if he could help it.” 

Lardo ran her hands over her face, her back turned to them all as she nodded. “I’ll type up the paperwork.”

When Bitty managed to look at Jack, his expression was unreadable, his eyes dark and his face a blank mask. He paused, holding Bitty’s gaze for a moment before he broke off, looking back at the window of fire. 

“All right, eight it is.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **EDIT 8/2/2018** : Hello everyone who is still reading this story! Thank you so much I love you all. I am so sorry for the HUGE hiatus but this story is not dead I promise. I took some time off to work on some original projects and now I'm working on finishing a couple chapters so I can have a regular update schedule when I start again. Thank you everyone, your comments and kudos mean so much to me. As always I am on [tumblr](http://dexondefense.tumblr.com/) if you need me.


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